Edited by - Monoskop · 2019. 8. 15. · Edited by Sandra Buckley Michael Hardt Brian...

Neuropolitics

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Michael Hardt

Brian Massumi

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PRACTICES OF RESISTANCE

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23 Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed William E. Connolly

22 Globalizing AIDS Cindy Patton

21 Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis Cesare Casarino

20 Means without End: Notes on Politics Giorgio Agamben

19 The Invention of Modern Science Isabelle Stengers

18 Methodologies of the Oppressed Chela Sandoval

17 Proust and Signs: The Complete Text Gilles Deleuze

16 Deleuze: The Clamor of Being Alain Badiou

15 Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State Antonio Negri

14 When Pain Strikes Bill Burns, Cathy Busby, and Kim Sawchuk, editors

13 Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” Cary Wolfe

12 The Metamorphoses of the Body José Gil

11 The New Spinoza Warren Montag and Ted Stolze, editors

10 Power and Invention:Situating Science Isabelle Stengers

9 Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity Ira Livingston

8 Becoming-Woman Camilla Griggers

7 A Potential Politics: Radical Thought in Italy Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, editors

6 Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time Éric Alliez

5 The Year of Passages Réda Bensmaïa

4 Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

3 Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons Eric Michaels

2 The Cinematic Body Steven Shaviro

1 The Coming Community Giorgio Agamben

Theory Out of Bounds Volume 23

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis • London

Neuropolitics

Thinking, Culture, Speed

William E. Connolly

An earlier version of chapter 4 first appeared as “Brain Waves, Transcendental Fields, and Techniques of Thought,” Radical Philosophy 94 (March/April 1999); reprinted with permission.

An earlier version of chapter 7 appeared as “Speed, Concentric Cultures, and Cosmopolitanism,” Political Theory 28 (October 2000): 519–618; copyright 2000 Sage Periodicals Press;

reprinted with permission of Sage Periodicals Press.

Copyright 2002 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted,

in any form or by any means,electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording, or otherwise, withoutthe prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290

Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520http://www.upress.umn.edu

L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S C A T A L O G I N G-I N-P U B L I C A T I O N D A T A

Connolly, William E.Neuropolitics : thinking, culture, speed / William E. Connolly.

p. cm. — (Theory out of bounds ; v. 23)Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8166-4021-1 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-4022-X (pbk. :alk. paper)

1. Thought and thinking. 2. Culture—Philosophy. 3. Speed—Socialaspects. 4. Mind and body—Social aspects. I. Title. II. Series.

B105.T54 C66 2002128—dc212002000858

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesotais an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

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For David and Debbie

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In fact, an important and pervasive shift is beginning to take place in cognitive science

under the very influence of its own research. This shift requires that we move away from

the idea of a world as independent and extrinsic to the idea of a world as inseparable from

the structure of these processes of self-modification.

—Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson,and Eleanor Rosch, The EmbodiedMind: Cognitive Science and HumanExperience

Neurons that fire together wire together.

—Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi,A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination

Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us,

conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and

they gaze upon us. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the

plants that grow up in him!

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak

Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, the unforeseen.

—Robert Bresson, Notes on theCinematographer

However, nobody has yet determined the limits of the body’s capabilities.

—Spinoza, The Ethics

Preface x i

C h a p t e r 1 . The Body/Brain/Culture Network 1

C h a p t e r 2 . The Color of Perception 2 2

C h a p t e r 3 . Nature, Affect, Thinking . . . 5 0

C h a p t e r 4 . Techniques of Thought and Micropolitics 8 0

C h a p t e r 5 . Memory Traces, Mystical States, and Deep Pluralism 1 1 4

C h a p t e r 6 . Democracy and Time 1 4 0

C h a p t e r 7 . Eccentric Flows and Cosmopolitan Culture 1 7 6

Notes 2 0 3

Index 2 1 7

Contents

the ambulance driver arrived in the middle of the night. He told the two teenstheir parents had been in a car accident. Their mom was injured but would survive.Their dad was dying. The driver would take them to the hospital. Their mother hadasked him to do so, as they wheeled her into the emergency room. They departedimmediately, forgetting the two young kids sound asleep in the house.

When they arrived their mother was in bad shape. The doctorswould not allow her to see her husband. But they could. He had fallen into a coma.His body was entangled in tubes and instruments. Other relatives soon arrived insmall groups. His grandfather pulled the boy aside. He said it was now time for himto become a man and support the family. The sixteen-year-old wondered whetherthese words were well timed. His dad was still breathing in the next room, for god’ssake, albeit with technical help.

Pluma was permitted to visit Bill two days later. Her concussionhad improved. She looked down at her husband and said, “Hi, Bill, I’m okay.” Hepuckered his lips and made a smacking sound. Some people began to wonder whetherthe announcement of his impending death was premature.

He sank into a deeper coma. It lasted about a month and a half.Then, slowly, he began to crawl out. One hot summer night, fairly late on, the for-mer navy private informed his son that they were prisoners on a battleship. With

Preface

grim authority he ordered the boy to grab the prison nurse when she arrived, lockher in the closet, and make a run for it with him. The boy tried to reason with theprivate. He said, “Look, this is a hospital, and everybody here is helping you.” Noresponse. Eventually the boy said, “If we were actually on a boat in the middle of theocean, Dad, there would be no place to run.” The private stared coldly at him, theway you would look at a coward in the middle of a war.

The boy decided not to join the enemy ranks. Not immediately,at least. So he worked with his dad on the plan. Keep the maniac talking and conspir-ing. It was not a great idea. The pressure built up as the plan progressed. He finallysaid, “Dad, your pelvis is broken and you can barely walk, let alone make a run for itwith me. (I may have to make that run alone . . .)”

“You hold on to me, boy, and we’ll run together.”“Okay.”A plan sealed in solidarity. That night, when the nurse walked

into the room, the boy took two quick steps toward her. Then, just before tossingthe guard into the closet, he glanced back at his dad with that sideways look they hadshared many times when plots hatched against “the girls” were about to falter. Thetwo fell into laughter. The scheme collapsed into itself for another night. The nursewas pleased they were having such a good time.

The prisoner made a break for it alone two nights later. Theyeventually found the escapee limping around the hospital grounds with a wastebas-ket full of belongings. Nobody knew how the commando had made it down the hall,several flights of stairs, out the door, and past the parking lot into a wooded area.The adventure, however, made him a favorite of the staff. People now shared storiesabout his daily exploits, of which there were many. But the family was also obligedto have someone on hand all night, every night. Or else they would put bars aroundthe paranoid’s bed during the late-night shifts. He would, in effect, find himself on aprison ship.

It was summer and school was out. The boy thus found himselfin a good position to watch his dad climb up a few plateaus of disposition, perception,memory, and judgment over the next several weeks. The thirty-six-year-old man waseventually released. After another year of recovery, he returned to the auto factory.For the first time in his life, he loved the work. A little brain damage goes a long wayon the assembly line. His short-term memory was shot; his higher intellectual capac-ities were curtailed. But he retained a strong sense of self, he had a sweet disposition,and he often gave sound advice during the next decades to his children, stepchildren,and grandchildren when they wondered what to do with their lives.

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My curiosity about relays between brain activity and cultural lifearrived the honest way. I can now offer a decent account of which of my father’sbrain nodules were badly damaged, which regained limited capacity, and which func-tioned well. Certainly his hippocampus — the delicate brain nodule involved in lay-ing down new memories — never made it all the way back. Otherwise the house wouldnot have been perpetually overstocked with milk and short on bread.

From time to time I have looked into brain research only to moveaway. It seemed too sucked into a reductive model of science and unappreciative ofthe need to enter into communication with phenomenological experience. A fewyears ago I took another look. It turned out that exciting things were happening andthat political questions I had been exploring over the past two decades could profitfrom attention to research into brain-body-culture relations.

This study explores the intersections of thinking, technique, eth-ical judgment, cultural pluralism, speed, and cosmopolitanism. It is a continuation oftwo recent studies, The Ethos of Pluralization and Why I Am Not a Secularist. Morethan those books, however, it folds insights from neuroscience and film, respectively,into its explorations. And it engages the issues of speed and time more actively. Byneuropolitics I do not mean that politics is reducible to genetically wired brain processesor that scientific observation of body/brain activity captures the actual experience ofthose observed. Reactions in cultural theory against such reductions are well taken,as we shall see in later pages. But, unfortunately, those very reactions often issue inarid conceptions of thinking, language, culture, ethics, and politics. To escape thecurse of reductive biology, many cultural theorists reduce body-politics to studies ofhow the body is represented in cultural politics. They do not appreciate the compositionaldimension of body-brain-culture relays. By neuropolitics, then, I mean the politicsthrough which cultural life mixes into the composition of body/brain processes. Andvice versa. The new neuroscience, while needing augmentation from cultural theory,encourages students of culture to attend to the layered character of thinking; it alsoalerts us to the critical significance of technique in thinking, ethics, and politics.

As I have followed this trail it has become clear that attention tocinema can also inform these explorations. The words, sounds, images, and rhythmsthrough which films prompt a synthesis of experience by viewers simulate the waymultimedia techniques and (what I call) micropolitics work in other venues. Filmanalysis helps us to discern multimedia techniques at work in organizing perceptualexperience, consolidating habits, composing ethical dispositions, and spurring newthoughts into being. Technique provides a medium through which cultures and brainsinfuse each other. Hand gestures, for instance, do not merely accompany speech.

x i i , x i i i

There is evidence that early in life such gestures help to activate speech capacity;later they serve as invaluable aids and triggers to adult talk. The idea is to draw neu-roscience, film theory, and political theory into communication to examine the roletechnique plays in thinking, ethics, and politics. Some films, as we shall see, also chal-lenge linear conceptions of time, encouraging us to address the ethical and politicalimplications of adopting a nonlinear conception.

I am indebted to many people for this book. My mother and fa-ther first. They taught by doing: make the most of what the contingencies of life of-fer. Their deaths render more palpable the multiple ways in which memory entersperception, thinking, judgment, and action. Recollection forms merely its surface;waves of memory subsist below recollection. I honor my parents in my dreams,these days. My children teach me too. David and Debbie help me, among manyother things, to be alert to the rapid pace of life and to the productive possibilitiesaccompanying its risks. They enliven me by their ways of being.

A Fellowship at the National Humanities Centre at AustralianNational University in the spring of 1999 allowed me to consolidate this study. Sev-eral scholars at ANU and the University of Sydney, most notably Anne Curthoys,John Docker, Paul Patton, Duncan Ivison, Moira Gatens, Ann Kaplan, and BarryHindess, read and discussed several chapters. Mike Shapiro showed me how pertinentthe study of film is to the issues that grip both of us. I have also presented early draftsof chapters as papers at a symposium between Charles Taylor and me on secularismat the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers; theConference on Obscene Powers at Southampton, England; a symposium on secular-ism and religion at Bellagio, Italy; a symposium on anthropology and secularism atCity University of New York; the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at theUniversity of Maryland; a couple of meetings of the American Political Science As-sociation (APSA); and a theme panel on my work at a meeting of the InternationalStudies Association. In each case, comments and suggestions by other participantshave proved very helpful. Talal Asad, Ben Corson, David Campbell, Tom Dumm,Bonnie Honig, Lauren Berlant, Steve Johnston, Kara Shaw, Mort Schoolman, MichaelWarner, Stephen White, and Linda Zerilli have read sections of the manuscript andoffered valuable comments.

The Johns Hopkins University is a stimulating place for intel-lectual life in general and political theory in particular. Conversations with DickFlathman regularly prompt my thinking. And discussions with graduate students intheory seminars have proved critical. I mention Jacquie Best, Jason Frank, DavidePanagia, Paul Saurette, Kathy Trevenen, Nick Tampio, Blake Ethridge, John

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Tambornino, Kam Shapiro, Lars Tonder, Paulina Ochoa, Smita Rahman, AndrewRoss, and Matt Moore as particularly compelling interlocutors. Kathy Trevenendoubled as a reader of the penultimate draft, helping me to refine the final version.Wendy Brown, a political theorist, Paul Patton, a philosopher, and Zachary Mainen,a neuroscientist, read an early draft of the entire manuscript. I am particularly gratefulfor their thoughtful comments and proposals, most of which have wound their wayinto the final result. Thanks, finally, to Jane Bennett. The seminars we have taughttogether at Hopkins find considerable expression in this book. Her work informs me,and, one hopes, her mode of being nudges the composition of my soul a bit closer tothe sensibility I embrace in theory.

x i v , x v

Neuroscience and Thinking

my first mission in this study is to explore the critical role that technique and dis-cipline play in thinking, ethics, and politics, and to do so in a way that accentuates thecreative and compositional dimensions of thinking. By the creative dimension I meanthe opaque process by which new ideas, concepts, and judgments bubble into being;by the compositional dimension I mean the way in which thinking helps to shape andconsolidate brain connections, corporeal dispositions, habits, and sensibilities. Sometheories, themselves products of arduous thought, ironically depreciate the activityin which the theorists are invested: they reduce thinking to cognition, or situate it ina wide band of transcendental regulations that curtail its inventiveness, or contract itinto a bland intellectualism that neglects its affective sources, somatic entanglements,and effects. But the inventive and compositional dimensions of thinking are essentialto freedom of the self and to cultivation of generosity in ethics and politics. Thinkingparticipates in that uncertain process by which new possibilities are ushered into being.One invention may be a new identity that jostles the roster of established constituen-cies as it struggles to find space. Another may be a thought-imbued disposition, in-corporated into the sensibility of an individual or folded into the ethos of engagementbetween constituencies.

The first objective, then, is to address complex relays in thinkingamong technique, composition, and creativity. The second is to explore the new cul-

The Body/Brain/Culture Network

tural pluralism, within and across territorial states, that beckons on the horizon ofcontemporary possibility. The assignment is to rework several representations ofculture, ethics, and politics in the light of the exploration into the layered characterof thinking. And to rework extant images of thinking in the light of this engagementwith body-brain-culture relations. My wager is that we can best pursue such anagenda by dipping into three tributaries:

1. A minor tradition of reflection upon nature, memory, thinking,the layering of culture, and an ethics of cultivation advanced atvarious times by theorists such as Lucretius, Spinoza, FriedrichNietzsche, Henri Bergson, William James, Sigmund Freud,Stuart Hampshire, Gilles Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers, and IlyaPrigogine

2. The new neuroscience of culture/brain/body relations, whichcomes into its own when placed into conversation with the firsttradition, advanced by researchers such as Antonio Damasio,Joseph LeDoux, V. S. Ramachandran, and Francisco Varela

3. Contemporary cinema techniques that heighten our powers ofperception; alert us to complex relays among affect, thinking,technique, and ethics; teach us how to apply pertinenttechniques to ourselves; and reveal things about theconstitution of time that might otherwise remain hidden

I pull these streams together to rework some established images of thought, culture,time, and possibility. My interest is not to predict the probability of the vision I sup-port, but to make its possibility shine more brightly. The terms of the assignmentexpose a problem. I am neither a neuroscientist nor a student of film. My task is toenter into conversation with neuroscience and film in the interest of advancing cul-tural theory. I seek to draw sustenance from them to reflect upon perception, think-ing, and time in politics.

Each issue engaged, no matter how removed it seems at first, ishitched to an agenda to advance a political pluralism appropriate to the accelerationof speed, compression of distance, and multidimensional diversity marking contempo-rary life. By multidimensional diversity I mean not just those contentious sects withinChristianity that helped to motivate the invention of public secularism. Multidimen-sional pluralism covers multiple zones of diversity — in gender practice, sensual affil-

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iation, conjugal form, ethnic identification, source of morality, language, and religious/metaphysical orientation. By the compression of distance I mean the contraction of thetime it takes to move people, management techniques, capital, products, labor, armies,weapons, ideas, books, newspapers, images, diseases, grievances, and aspirations acrosslarge stretches of territory.

You will have noticed neuroscience on the list of topics to ad-dress. Because it is, the following question is often posed to me these days, particu-larly by friends: “But, Bill, doesn’t that venture drive you to the very reductionism(or scientism, phrenology, sociobiology, genetic determinism, behaviorism, eliminativematerialism, barefoot empiricism, depreciation of language, etc.) you have heretoforefought against?” I don’t think so. My sense is that in their laudable attempt to wardoff one type of reductionism too many cultural theorists fall into another: they lapseinto a reductionism that ignores how biology is mixed into thinking and culture andhow other aspects of nature are folded into both.

Every theory of culture bears an implicit relation to biology andbiological theory. The more cultural theorists try to avoid this gritty terrain, themore they either implicitly recapitulate one of two classical conceptions of naturethat have long contended for primacy in Euro-American life or levitate toward a dis-embodied model of thinking, culture, and ethics that is difficult to sustain. By classi-cal conceptions of nature I mean, first and roughly, the rich theo-teleological traditionthat is inaugurated by Aristotle, finds expression in one side of Augustine, becomesconsolidated in Aquinas, is reconfigured into a necessary subjective presumption inKant’s philosophical revolution, becomes reenergized by Hegel, and now finds moremuted and variable expression in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, AlasdairMacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, and Charles Taylor. I mean, second, the lawlikemodel of science that sets itself against the first tradition, unfolds in Copernicus andGalileo after a desperate struggle with the Catholic Church, becomes perfected byKepler and Newton, is transfigured into a necessary regulative ideal of scientificknowledge by Kant, and continues in some contemporary versions of quantum me-chanics, relativity, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory. When cultural theory in-vokes the first tradition, it slips into a model of essentially embodied selves attunedto thick universals or an intrinsic purpose. When it supposes the second, it ofteneither retreats toward a disembodied conception of cultural life or crawls into theblack hole of sociobiology.

Perhaps the existing pool of alternatives is too small. At any rate,I am inspired by the dissenting discourse on nature noted above. It is when the newneuroscience is put into conversation with this tradition, and both are augmented by

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insights from contemporary cinema, that things become interesting. Indeed, someparticipants in the new neuroscience, as we shall see, are moving in this directionunder their own steam.

I contend neither that conceptions of thinking and culture cansimply be derived from a particular conception of nature nor that the minor traditioninspiring me has been definitively established. In fact, it is unwise to extrapolatewith serene confidence from any domain of inquiry to another. Such jumps in thepast helped to create the reductionism that has shadowed the human sciences sincethe time of Hobbes. But every image of nature does set conditions and restraintsthat must be negotiated somehow to support a specific conception of culture. Todaycompetition between the two prevailing images of nature is still so authoritative, atleast in cultural theory, that it thwarts exploration into the complex relations amongthinking, culture, brains, and bodies.

Isabelle Stengers, a philosopher of science, indicates how devel-opments within the natural sciences themselves create new possibilities of thoughtabout the nature of science. She contends that these developments, generated by ex-periences of dissonance between the regulative ideal of scientific knowledge andprocesses that seem to deviate from it, open a door to new experimentation in cul-tural theory too. But she also knows that contemporary guardians of determinism,reductionism, and the sufficiency of lawlike knowledge work diligently to delegitimatesuch efforts, even though the ideals they endorse themselves contain a powerful doseof speculation. These guardians police deviations from the established ideal of knowl-edge almost as diligently as Cardinal Bellarmine and Pope Urban VIII guarded theVatican view of the cosmos against Galileo and his telescope. Here, though, is Stengerson the opening and the possibility:

At both the macroscopic and microscopic levels the sciences of nature arethus liberated from a narrow conception of objective reality, which believesit must in principle deny novelty and diversity in the name of an unchanginguniversal law. . . . They are from now on open to unpredictability, no longerviewed in terms of imperfect knowledge, or of insufficient control. Thus,they are open to a dialogue with a nature that cannot be dominated by a the-oretical gaze, but must be explored with an open world to which we belong,in whose construction we participate.1

It is not whether practitioners committed to different regulativeideals of knowledge come to terms with anomalies, small fluctuations with big effects,and limits to the human ability to specify initial conditions precisely, but how they do.

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Some put their money on a determinist regulative ideal, whereas others project anelement of unpredictability and historical development into the most complex sys-tems of nature. I join Nietzsche, Prigogine, and Stengers, for reasons to be reviewedin chapter 3, in pursuing the second agenda.

“A dialogue with a nature that cannot be dominated by a theo-retical gaze” — the hardest nut to crack in pursuing that dialogue, at least in cul-tural theory, is the place of neuroscience in the study of body/brain/culture rela-tions. Cultural theorists are wary of forging the connection, with good historicalreasons. The previous history of contact fostered a deadly reductionism.2 Butchanges in neuroscience make the case for renewing the conversation more com-pelling. Many contemporary neuroscientists (Damasio, LeDoux, and Varela are ex-emplary here) have already opened the door from their side. They have readWilliam James, Sigmund Freud, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty more carefully thanmost of us have consulted work in their field. And it is well to remember that lead-ing cultural theorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as HenriBergson, James, Merleau-Ponty, and Freud paid close attention to the biologicaltheories of their day. It might be wise for us to do the same. So let me start by sum-marizing three recent case studies.

1. Ms. Jones is very intelligent and is also excellent at learningnew facts. So her hippocampus, the brain nodule that launchesthe network for laying down new memories, is in fine shape.But she exudes a positive attitude toward life, never ruffled bynew experiences of danger, betrayal, or abuse. “We were tolearn that this very same attitude pervaded all areas of her life.She made friends easily, formed romantic attachments withoutdifficulty, and had often been taken advantage of by those shetrusted. . . . It was as if negative emotions such as fear and angerhad been removed from her affective vocabulary, allowing thepositive emotions to dominate her life.”3 And, indeed, whentests were run to gauge her ability to discriminate betweendangerous and benign situations according to conventionalsigns, she failed them miserably.

2. Mrs. Dodd recently had a stroke and lost the use of her lefthand. She is quite capable of recognizing people, speaking, andmaking everyday judgments in most situations. But she also

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insists that she can use her left hand normally when she in factcannot. She is questioned: “Can you use your right hand?”“Yes . . .” “Can you use your left hand?” Yes . . .” “Can you clap?”“Yes.” “Will you clap for me now?” “Yes.” “Are you clapping?”“Yes, I’m clapping.”4 Whatever experiment is run with Mrs.Dodd she either insists that she is accomplishing the feat inquestion when she is not or explains her failure to do so byreference to some annoying interference (her arm is tired afterbeing pestered by the doctors, she slipped up this particulartime, and so on).

3. Philip lost his left arm several years ago after an accident. He,like many others with severed limbs, has been plagued by severe“phantom pain” in that arm, a pain that cannot be relievedbecause there is no arm to which it is attached. Working on thehunch that the pain is bound up with messages transmitted tothe brain of paralysis in the lost arm, V. S. Ramachandrandeveloped a “mirror box” that allows Philip, when peering intoit, to see an image in which both of his arms appear to befunctioning. When asked to move his right and left armssimultaneously, he moves his right arm and the mirror imagemakes it appear that both arms are moving. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God, doctor! This is unbelievable. . . . My left arm isplugged in again. It’s as if I’m in the past. . . . I can feel my elbowmoving, my wrist moving. It’s all moving again.”5 Philip andsome other patients have been able to reduce or relievephantom arm pain by using the mirror box to simulatemovement in their lost limb.

Before pursuing possible implications of these three examplesfor cultural theory, let’s consider common objections that seek to cut off preciselythis exploration. One charge is that these are individual cases, whereas cultural theorydeals with collective relations and intersubjective processes. There is something tothe objection, but its import is easily overstated. Some neuroscientists, as we shallsee in later chapters, construct experiments that play up the intersubjective characterof thinking and judgment introduced here. More fundamentally, it is not only pertinent


to see that life is culturally constituted, it is also important to come to terms with thelayered character of culture itself. Although cultural theorists do have things to teachneuroscientists, some research by the latter can teach us a thing or two about thelayered character of culture. It can show us how the inwardization of culture, repletewith resistances and ambivalences, is installed at several levels of being, with eachlevel both interacting with the others and marked by different speeds, capacities, anddegrees of linguistic sophistication. These examples help in this respect, doing so inways that leave open the Freudian interpretation of culture as a possibility withoutautomatically treating it as the only way to come to terms with the layering of cul-ture. To explore these issues, of course, is sometimes to draw these findings into aperspective that is not entirely that of the neuroscientists themselves.

A related objection is that the exploration of damage to body/brain processes undercuts appreciation of how denial, repression, ambivalence, dis-placement, and sublimation occur in the absence of such injuries. The researchers inquestion, however, do not deny this. Rather, they alert cultural theorists to the needto attend to work in neuroscience as they advance such interpretations; they showhow such interpretations in the absence of that awareness can treat denial as theonly issue when other things are involved; and, as we shall see in chapters 4 and 5,they suggest the pertinence of a wider range of techniques to thinking, judgment,and ethics than are often sanctioned in cultural theory in general or psychoanalytictheory in particular.

A final objection is the most substantial: that sophisticated ob-servation of brain physicochemical activity may correlate with phenomenological ex-periences of thinking, desiring, dreaming, judging, and so on, but it cannot capturethe shape and quality of those experiences. This objection is so important it deservesto be transfigured into a grounding theme of this study: to date, and into the fore-seeable future, there is a gap between third-person observations of brain/body activity,however sophisticated they have become in recent neuroscience, and phenomenolog-ical experience correlated with those observations. The question is not how to elim-inate the discrepancy but how to respond to it. One response is to treat it as a sign thatmind and body are different substances, as in the mind/body dualism of Descartes and,in a different way, of Kant. Alternatively, it might be treated as a sign that humans,as embodied, thinking beings, form two irreducible perspectives on themselves.Spinoza introduced this view, treating thought and extension as two aspects of thesame substance rather than two kinds of stuff from which the universe is composed.I adopt a modified version of Spinoza’s “parallelism,” to be developed in chapter 4.

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In my judgment, neither that thesis nor those contending against it have beenproved. But a modified Spinozism can marshal points in its favor.6 First, it expressesthe understanding of those who contend that human life evolved from lower formswithout divine intervention, and it does so without reducing human experience tothird-person accounts of it. Second, it encourages cultural theorists to explore accu-mulating evidence of significant correlations between the observation of body/brainprocesses and the lived experience of thinking. Third, it encourages us to come toterms actively with a variety of techniques — many of which already operate in everydaylife — that can stimulate changes in thinking without adopting a reductionist image ofthought in doing so. Fourth, it allows us to explore how thinking itself can some-times modify the microcomposition of body/brain processes, as a new pattern ofthinking becomes infused into body/brain processes. For, as Gerald Edelman andGiulio Tonino, two leading neuroscientists, put the point pithily, “Neurons that firetogether wire together.”7 The version of parallelism adopted here encourages explo-ration of opaque, ubiquitous relations between technique and thinking without re-ducing the experience of thinking itself to a series of observational states. It appreci-ates the complexity of thinking while encouraging us to deploy technique to becomemore thoughtful.8 Technique is part of culture, and thinking is neurocultural.

With these provisos in mind, let’s explore the three cases sum-marized above. A brain scan of Ms. Jones by Antonio Damasio revealed that “bothamygdalae, the one in the left and the one in the right temporal lobes, were almostentirely calcified.”9 The amygdala is a speedy, crude little brain nodule that communi-cates with higher, slower brain regions, triggering feelings of fear, caution, and anx-iety in response to specific encounters. It does not itself express those feelings, butrelays messages to bodily centers where they are felt. The amygdala is apparentlynot activated when feelings of pleasure and joy emerge.

The case of Ms. Jones already indicates something about the lay-ered complexity of thinking, feeling, and judgment. It suggests that cultural learningis inscribed to some degree in memory traces of the amygdala, even if that brainnodule is itself simple in linguistic complexity and even though more refined brainregions must be engaged before complex interpretations of its crude, affectively im-bued memory arise. The tests given to Ms. Jones did consist of conventional cues.Ms. Jones’s case also illustrates how much of perception and thinking is prior to con-sciousness, even without introducing a repression hypothesis to make that point.Several brain nodules of different speed and capacity of cultural organization arelinked together and to several body zones by a series of relays and feedback loops.They operate together to give texture to memory, perception, thinking, and judgment.

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The case also opens questions about the constitutive role of affectin thought and judgment. As neuroscience pulls away from computer models of thebrain widely accepted in the 1970s, the significance of affect also moves front andcenter. It is still an uncertain domain. What role does affective memory play in themovement of thought and judgment? If the movement of affect has a quirky element,is that quirkiness transmitted to the mobility of thought itself? What would it be liketo think without affect? (Ms. Jones does not do that; she lacks anxiety and fear, nothappiness, joy, and positive anticipation.) What about laughter as a manifestation ofsurplus affect? Can it, when triggered by side perceptions at odds with the dominantdrift of perception and interpretation, interrupt the flow of thought and open a win-dow of creativity in it? The idea, once more, is not to derive the logic of cultural ac-tivity from neuroscience. It is to pursue conversations between cultural theory andneuroscience.

In the case of Mrs. Dodd, a key question is why the strategy ofdenial is so powerful. Is this because, as some psychologists have argued, the patientretreats into denial after experiencing such a numbing injury? Or is it because, assome neuroscientists have argued, the damage to the right hemisphere that makesthe left arm immovable also creates “perceptual neglect” of the patient’s left side?Neither theory quite does the job, according to V. S. Ramachandran, although hisexperimentally informed speculations incorporate some elements from both. Mrs.Dodd does have damage to the right hemisphere, and experiments do show that theleft side is neglected in her perceptual experience. But she also answers pointedquestions in a way that suggests a subdued sense that she is covering up something.When asked, for instance, whether she had tied her shoelace the day before (she hadnot), she replied emphatically, “I tied the shoelace with both hands,” in a way that is atleast consonant with the denial hypothesis. But one of the things impaired in Mrs.Dodd “is the manner in which the brain deals with a discrepancy in sensory inputsabout the body image.”10

Ramachandran suggests that the observable damage to the righthemisphere does more than cause perceptual neglect of the left arm. It does that.But it also inhibits the production of disconcerting evidence that could counter at-tempts on the left side to preserve the body image intact before the injury occurred.That is, damage to the right hemisphere leaves the left hemisphere more free to resistevidence that confirms the inability to move the arm. Again, it is not that rationaliza-tion never occurs without right hemisphere damage, but that right hemisphere dam-age both exacerbates it and gives the conformist left hemisphere hegemony in inter-pretation. Ramachandran says:

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What we have observed in Betty and the other patients . . . supports the ideathat the left hemisphere is conformist, largely indifferent to discrepancies,whereas the right hemisphere is the opposite: highly sensitive to perturbation.But our experiments only provide circumstantial evidence for this theory.We needed direct proof.11

I don’t know whether Ramachandran is right. But one way totest his interpretation is to use technologies such as functional magnetic resonanceand positron emission topography, which have been widely available for only about adecade. In one series of tests on clients who have normal capacity in all brain regions,a discrepancy between performance and body image makes the right hemisphere “lightup.” But of course this does not happen in those with right hemisphere damage,lending support to Ramachandran’s conjecture that damage to the right hemispherenot only disables left arm movement but also gives theory-spinning, identity-protectingactivity on the left side free rein in protecting the image of bodily integrity. Suchtests, in general, enable researchers to record the flow of connections between zonesmaking up the brain/body network.

These explorations, and others like them, further support theidea that thinking is a complex, layered activity, with each layer contributing somethingto an ensemble of dissonant relays and feedback loops between numerous centers.These loops include many different bodily sites sending signals about the state ofthe body to the brain.

The first two examples, taken together, suggest the insufficiencyof what might be called intellectualist and deliberationist models of thinking that re-tain so much credibility in philosophy and the human sciences. Attempts to give sin-gular priority to the highest and conceptually most sophisticated brain nodules inthinking and judgment may encourage those invested in these theories to under-estimate the importance of body image, unconscious motor memory, and thought-imbued affect.

The third case, the man whose phantom pain is relieved by themirror technique, is perhaps the most fascinating. Ramachandran shows how psycho-logical models of phantom pain are inadequate to explain the phenomenon, but hedoes so in a way that retains a place for imagination and illusion both in the productionof intense, stubborn pain and in its relief. His initial move is to review the brain’smap of bodily zones in the homunculus, a small complex located near the top of thecerebral cortex. It receives messages about body states in different zones of the bodyand registers them on an arc-shaped surface.

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The “sensory homunculus,” as it is now called, forms a greatly distortedrepresentation of the body on the surface of the brain, with the parts that areparticularly important taking up disproportionately large areas. For example,the area involved with the lips or with the fingers takes up as much space asthe area involved with the entire trunk of the body. . . , presumably becauseyour lips and fingers are highly sensitive to touch . . . whereas your trunk isconsiderably less sensitive, requiring less cortical space. For the most partthe map is orderly though upside down. However . . . upon close examinationyou will see that the face is not near the neck, where it should be, but is be-low the hand. The genitals, instead of being between the thighs, are locatedbelow the foot.12

I will let the reader work out Ramachandran’s playful theory ofthe foot fetish. But consider his account of phantom pain in the hand. When the limbis lost, no message can be sent by the limb to its corresponding site on the brainmap. Nor can one be received by the limb from the brain. But when Ramachandrantouched a couple of spots on the patient’s cheek, he found that the amputee now feltthe touch on both his cheek and his phantom hand, whereas people with intact handsdo not feel the touch at the second site. They feel it only on the cheek, where thetouch is applied. Somehow, hand feeling can migrate to sensory fibers on the faceamong people who have lost their hands. A creative move by the brain below theconscious recognition and willful control of the agents involved, you might say. Butit can be tough for amputees who smile or grimace a lot. This migration of sensoryfeeling on the surface of the homunculus is borne out with other patients, accordingto Ramachandran, both in their stated responses to touch and temperature changeand through measurements of brain activity in the zones in question.

The brain sometimes remaps itself when it loses messages from alost limb, so feelings previously linked to one bodily site move to another spot onthe map close to the original site. Spinoza and Merleau-Ponty would say that thebrain recomposes itself to retain a coherent body image under new conditions. Speak-ing of another patient with phantom pain, Ramachandran says now “every time Tomsmiles or moves his face and lips, the impulses activate the ‘hand’ area of his cortex,creating the illusion that his hand is still there.”13 This is a dramatic instance of whatI am calling the compositional dimension of body/brain/culture activity.

How does such remapping occur? It still remains uncertain, butRamachandran’s best surmise is that there is a redundancy of connections betweenthe “hand” and the brain, and that the secondary route becomes activated when theprimary connection to the real hand is lost. The arousal of the secondary pattern

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suggests how each neural pattern is nested in a larger complex. “Far from signaling aspecific location on the skin, each neuron in the map is in a state of dynamic equi-librium with other adjacent neurons; its significance depends strongly on what otherneurons in the vicinity are doing.”14

How does a phantom limb become entangled in a feeling of in-tense pain? A good bet is that confused signals are sent to the brain site from the newlyactivated area; the brain misinterprets the mess as a signal of pain, so that the amputeenow experiences pain in an absent limb. Moreover, since no countermessages are sentby the limb itself (because it is not there), the pain is intensified through a series offeedback loops not subject to self-correction. The more you tighten your jaw mus-cles while the dentist works on a tooth, the more sharply you feel pain in that area.

We have traveled some distance from a theory of denial anchoredin the view that the trauma of limb loss creates a semblance of pain that talk therapymight relieve. But, still, some concept of denial is invoked in describing how thebrain works below the level of intellectual attention to preserve an earlier body image.And therapy in an expanded sense is relevant here too. In the case in question, spe-cific tactics are purposely applied by others, or the actors themselves, to body/brainrelays below conscious regulation. Doing so promotes modest brain remapping.

The most brilliant innovation in this respect is Ramachandran’sintroduction of the mirror box to reduce phantom pain. It is still uncertain how longsuch relief lasts, and it does not work for all patients. But in those for whom it doeswork it seems likely that a modest recomposition of brain connections is accomplishedthrough a movement in one limb and a mirror image that makes the missing limbappear to move also. Ramachandran uses this occasion to enunciate some reservationsabout computer models of the brain:

Popularized by artificial intelligence researchers, the idea that the brain be-haves like a computer, with each nodule performing a highly specialized joband sending its output to the next nodule is widely believed. . . . But my ex-periments . . . have taught me that this is not how the brain works. Its con-nections are extraordinarily labile and dynamic. Perceptions emerge as a resultof reverberations of signals between different levels of the sensory hierarchy,indeed even across different senses. The fact that visual input can eliminatethe spasm of a nonexistent arm and then erase the associated memory ofpain vividly illustrates how extensive and profound these interactions are.15

Ramachandran’s experiments with phantom pain suggest howvariable in speed and complexity different levels of the brain/body network are.


They suggest as well how sensory experiences such as visual image, sound, smell,and movement interact in mapping brain patterns. Finally, they suggest that in do-mains where direct intellectual reconfiguration is insufficient (“I now accept theloss of my limb, so I should stop feeling pain”) an ensemble of techniques or tacticsapplied to regions below direct intellectual control can sometimes reorganize pre-dispositions to perception, feeling, and judgment. These experiments in brain rewiringby tactical means invite a return to forgotten questions about how cultural ritual,discipline and arts of self-cultivation infiltrate into patterns of thinking, identity, andethical sensibility.

They also invite attention to the interplay of sound, rhythm,movement, and image in the films we watch in dark theaters. For films, too, commu-nicate affective energies to us, some of which pass below intellectual attention whilestill influencing emotions, judgments, and actions. These considerations encourageus to augment intellectualist models of thinking and culture with a perspective thatappreciates the dense interweaving of genetic endowment, image, movement, sound,rhythm, smell, touch, technique, trauma, exercise, thinking, and sensibility. Thinkingis implicated in body/brain/culture networks that extend well beyond the skin of thethinker.

A Touch of Vertigo

If you are interested in the relationship between technique, feeling, perception, andthought, film might provide a strategic site of exploration. Films both apply tech-niques to us to mobilize affect and teach us about how such techniques work outsidethe celluloid world. In this study I draw upon several films to explore the role ofaffect in the mobility of thought, the role of memory traces in faith and judgment,the intimate relation between technique and thinking, and the nonlinear characterof time.

Consider, by way of a first example, Vertigo, a film I have seen threetimes over a span of twenty-five years. It can be engaged in several ways, and my en-gagement has shifted each time I have viewed it. Laura Mulvey, for instance, exam-ines how the gaze that governs the film is male. Tania Modleski contends that themale gaze is both there and “severely disturbed” as the film carries the charactersthrough a series of dizzying experiences.16 Another interpretation, taking off fromModleski’s account, might ask how fantasy, illusion, and disturbance circulate be-tween male and female characters as the film advances. My interest is touched bythese concerns, but it focuses on the techniques by which the film induces effects onthe infraconscious perception of viewers. The question is what cinematic tactics can

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teach us about the cultural stimuli to thought and thoughtlessness, the layering ofperception, and the role of affect in perception and thought. These insights, oncedeveloped, can inform the reflective techniques we apply to ourselves to stimulatethought, to complicate judgment, or to refine ethical sensibility. So an interest in think-ing about thought governs my exploration of film technique. That interest does notdistinguish me from others, for it is often present in film interpretation. It does shiftthe focus, however, from appraising the ideological politics, narrative form, and cul-tural message to exploring the relations between narrative flow and specific tech-niques of delivery. To keep my mind on that issue, I select films that have touchedme in some way or other, often in ways that surprised me, and sometimes in waysthat disturbed me. In none of the selections is my first impulse to reach for an ideo-logical gun and start firing — even though there are things in the politics of the filmsI would criticize.

In Vertigo, director Alfred Hitchcock carries us to the point whereJohn “Scottie” Ferguson, the retired detective who gets dizzy at high places, is re-covering. His recovery is slow because a year ago he saw Madeleine — the eerilybeautiful woman whose husband hired him to follow her because she was communingwith a dead woman — jump to her death from a mission bell tower. He did not chaseher to the top before she jumped because an attack of vertigo stopped him in histracks on the way up. He is now haunted by a mixture of guilt, love for the deadwoman, and a strange sense that she may still be alive. We hope he recovers fromthe last folly. But we too may have an uncanny sense that she is alive. Why? Is it en-tirely because we participate in the feminine mystique in which Scottie is caught? Idoubt that such an explanation suffices. There is an additional element. When shefalls, we are located in the same line of vision as Scottie, whose vertigo agitates hisvision as he stares down at the falling body. We are agitated too by the intensity ofthe drama, which is accentuated by the musical score accompanying it. The body, asit drops head first, looks less like a live body falling than it should. Besides, thescream precedes the falling body in a way that is at odds with the probable timing ofa person who has jumped. When I saw (and heard) the film a second time after manyyears, knowing the plot but not recalling its details, it seemed to me that Hitchcockat that moment fell below the technical virtuosity normally marking his films. But Inow think, after a third viewing, that he inserted in both Scottie and us a side per-ception unavailable for conscious attention while the unnerving action was underway. We absorb an infraconscious perception that later infuses an eerie undertone ofdoubt into recollections of Madeleine’s fall to death. That doubt could be explainedaway, of course, as due to our desire that this beautiful woman be alive. Such an expla-

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nation, while pertinent, may not suffice, partly because not everyone who partici-pates in the nagging doubt about Madeleine’s death is deeply invested in the particularideal of femininity infecting Scottie. But they may still be haunted by an infracon-scious perception that disrupts their first impression of a fall they have seen withtheir own two eyes. And so is Scottie. For just as we share his line of vision, heshares ours.

The layered memory of the scene becomes fodder for dreamsand daydreams. The result might be a new and surprising line of thought or an ob-sessive course of action not fully comprehensible to the one overtaken by it. SoJohnneo — as his other and practical girlfriend Midge sometimes calls him — findshimself searching the San Francisco streets for Madeleine a year after he has recov-ered enough from her loss to get up and around. One day he meets Judy, a working-class woman with darker hair and a coarser style who nonetheless looks strikinglylike Madeleine.

The infraconscious memory of a body that does not fall preciselylike a live body makes a contribution to both Scottie’s search for Madeleine and hislater obsession with the woman who looks strangely like her. It may infect the view-ers too, drawing us into Scottie’s improbable search more than we otherwise mightbe. Hitchcock displays the layered character of perception, memory, and judgmentin the ways he works upon us. Often enough he invites us to think about what hedoes and how he does it.

After Scottie concludes that Judy is really Madeleine, he insiststhat they change their plans for dinner and drive to a restaurant that happens to beon the same road he and Madeleine had taken to the mission. If she is Madeleine,she is implicated in murder. By this point we know she is Madeleine (Hitchcock hadto fight to get this point past the producer). We feel her anxiety level rise as theydrive to the mission again. As we do, Hitchcock does more supplemental work onour anxieties. The scene flashes from a take in which the car is going down the rightside of the road to one in which Scottie is driving on the left side. There is a shortcut, and we then return to the car running faster down the left side of the road, withthe white dividing line dimly discernible through the rear window. The eye takes inmore than it registers explicitly, as I will show in the next chapter. The first time Isaw this scene, I was engrossed in the intense feelings it engendered. I did not forman explicit image of the car in the left lane, but an implicit awareness of it surelyformed part of the subtext agitating me: in San Francisco, driving on the left side ofthe road is apt to cause a head-on collision. This side perception was not exactly arepressed perception: it never made it to the conscious level to be repressed.

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Something in my second viewing of the film enabled me to con-vert the side perception into a conscious image. It was a second viewing after all, andI was reading Bergson at the time on how the influx of sensory material must be sub-tracted to enable action-oriented perception. I was stunned. On yet a subsequent view-ing, with three other people, we observed the lane switch together. Here Hitchcockdoes to us what Scottie does to Madeleine, and what she had previously done to him.He infects us with a touch of vertigo. A little vertigo is indispensable to creative think-ing, while a lot can freeze you into a zombie, as Scottie found out for a year afterMadeleine’s apparent death.

A Lacanian reading of this story could be given. To abbreviate:Madeleine embodies the fantasy of the impossible woman for Scottie, and he isdoomed to pursue that fantasy wherever it takes him.17 He can thus step to the edgeof the precipice in the mission tower without getting dizzy only after Madeleine hasjumped to her death. Such an interpretation is plausible, but it does not exhaust theone I would offer. Its parameters are sometimes presented as too complete and closed,leaving little room for experimental thought and action to stretch the possibilities ofbeing it acknowledges. There are other elements in the film — two of which we havereviewed — that call into question not so much what Scottie does as the inevitabilityof his doing it. Consummate narratives invest theory, explanation, and interpretationwith more certainty and sufficiency than they warrant. They express the hubris oftheory in a world too complexly intermeshed to fit the strictures of either lawlike ex-planation or deep interpretation.

I shall argue later that it is precisely at the nodal points wherethe fundamental assumptions of contending theories differ that we should strive forreciprocal modesty. Interpretations presented as both authoritative and final closedown experimentation with new possibilities of being and action before the experi-ments have a chance to get off the ground. And inordinate confidence in the explana-tory sufficiency of a particular narrative often goes hand in hand with the tendencyto mute the significance of technique in film and life. The importance of techniqueto perception, thinking, judgment, and action becomes accentuated if we acknowledgethat we still don’t know with assurance everything we can do or become.

Interesting things might happen if you place film technique intocontact with your own perceptual experience, and both of these in turn with engage-ments with perception and thinking in contemporary neuroscience and cultural theory.Attention to one forum allows you to address questions to the others. Or test thingsenacted in them. Some findings in cultural theory and neuroscience, initially implau-sible to many, might become available to a wider audience through this or that film.

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Film was, after all, the preeminent medium through which Freudian theory becameinfused into popular culture in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. Youmight draw upon film techniques to trigger creativity in your own thinking or tocultivate some noble potentiality in your sensibility.

We will examine in chapter 5 how and why Freud shies away fromthe “pagan” techniques that figure prominently in film today. But Ramachandran,Bergson, and Hitchcock, unconstrained by Freud’s restrictions in this domain, couldhave a field day together. All three might concur with Robert Bresson, the film direc-tor, when he says, “Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, the unforeseen.”18 And,perhaps, with a corollary: Hostility to art and the new finds expression in doctrinesthat set stringent limits in advance on experimentation in cultural theory and tech-nique in cultural life.

The Layering of Culture

Today many cultural and political theorists act as if ethics and politics do, could, orshould consist of deliberation alone. They are deliberative democrats. Critical theo-rists often contest that view, but many of them then treat subliminal influences as ifthey were reducible to modes of manipulation or behavioral management to be over-come in a rational or deliberative society. Here the world of ritual, artistry, technique,and micropolitics often becomes equated with “magic,” “primitivism,” “paganism,”or “the aestheticization of politics.”19 Others affirm the latter processes by talkingabout the “constructed character” of desire, identity, and culture; but then somelimit the materials of social construction to sophisticated linguistic performancesthat are relevant but insufficient to the phenomena. Some constructivists, you mightsay, do not make their constructivism deep or layered enough, paying too little atten-tion to how lower layers become sedimented. But if constructivism remains thin anduntextured, and no third way is consolidated between it and the flat realism it chal-lenges, the stage is set for a forceful return to the other side of a too-simple statementof alternatives. Others examine the role of tactics and discipline in identity and cul-ture but then leave both out of thinking, morality, or reason, doing so to retain thepurity of one or all these activities. Others yet acknowledge these elements but thenact as if they do their real work only in the private realm where “religion” and “thelife world” are said to flourish. Still others acknowledge the insufficiency of theforegoing images but enclose thinking, culture, and ethical cultivation in a theo-teleological doctrine, fearing that the world would fall apart if the embodied, layeredcharacter of thinking and culture were not contained in a teleological frame. Theydefend a layered, organic conception of thinking, identity, and culture, even as they

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insist that the accelerated pace of contemporary life pulls people away from attune-ment to intrinsic purpose. In doing so, they may discourage cultural theorists whoseek to deepen appreciation of the layered character of thought and culture but hes-itate to throw their weight behind a theo-teleological perspective by doing so.20

I draw things from several of these traditions. For example, Iwould probably choose constructivism over realism if the choices were reduced tothose two. And I think participants in the theo-teleological tradition are wise to linktheir readings of corporeo-cultural life to an ethic of cultivation over a morality ofcommand. It is just that I don’t endorse, as will become clear, the social ideal towhich they typically attach that ethic. I am not in a position to prove my alternativedefinitively, but neither are they. They have, in a sense, had things easy, defendingthemselves mostly against the twin alternatives of biological reductionism and insuf-ficiently layered models of culture. We might enliven the terms of debate by intro-ducing another party more actively into the conversation: a perspective that addressesthe layered character of being without endorsing finalism, that taps into creativepossibilities residing in the dissonances between layers of culture, and that locatespromise as well as danger for cultural pluralism in the acceleration of pace in contem-porary life. According to the tradition mined here, too many perspectives disparagethe layering of thinking, ethics, and culture; the distinctive roles technique, disci-pline, and cultivation play in them; or both.

What, more closely, is the conjunction between thinking andculture? Culture is constituted in part by the perceptions, beliefs, and concepts in it.Thought enters into, in Hegel’s terms, the subjective and intersubjective dimensionsof culture. Here tension, dissonance, and discrepancy can arise not only between thebeliefs of one constituency and those of others, but between dispositional tendenciesand explicit beliefs in the same constituency. Much about the ambivalence, conflict,and mobility of culture is lodged in the latter dimension. But such an image, whilerelevant, is still insufficient to the layered complexity of thinking and culture. First,it fails to gauge how sedimented “memory traces” — as intensive thought fragmentsin a self or culture — can affect thinking and judgment without themselves being ar-ticulable, and how the application of subtle techniques sometimes affects the shapeand intensity of such traces. We leave such an exploration for a later chapter, in theinterest of pursuing here another dimension of culture.

Cultural ideas and beliefs are organized, consolidated, and con-strained in what, following Hegel, can be called the objective dimension of institu-tional life.21 Objektivat, in German, means that which “stands over,” as well as thatwhich is “detached.” The first sense is the most pertinent. The objective dimension

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of culture not only enters into subjective and intersubjective life, it recoils backupon subjective dispositions and intersubjective understandings, providing things tobe inwardized by them, or limiting their possibilities of realization, or setting barriersto be acted upon. It is easy to see how subjective desires, judgments, demands, andanxieties can be at odds with the layered matrix of cultural understandings. Youmight think yourself innocent of a crime because your image of responsibility devi-ates from that expressed in prevailing judicial practice. So the intersubjective standsover the subjective, even while being woven into it.

There is more yet to the objective element. Ideationally infusedpractices such as those associated with energy sources, architectural forms, incentivesystems, dietary regimes, practices of property, dictionaries, the treatment of disease,work processes, police modes of arrest and violence, investment and saving instru-ments, corporeal skills, and punishment have nonideational elements woven intothem. True, anthracite, merely a black rock in some contexts, becomes a crucial energyresource in a different ideational setting. But the shift from rock to energy resourceis not only ideational. Try burning gravel in a potbellied stove to heat up your cabin.And anthracite is not ideational about itself. When anthracite becomes a key sourceof energy instead of, say, wood, oil, or nuclear power, the institutional complex intowhich it is inserted exerts distinctive effects upon the speed, curvature, and limits ofcultural life. Try burning anthracite to power a jet plane.

The objective dimension of culture, finally, includes specific waysin which one materialized institution meshes with, grates on, or collides with others,engendering complex meshworks of dependence and interdependence that recoilback upon individual desires, constituency pursuits, ethical injunctions, and state agen-das. The objective dimension of culture, again, is not isolable from the intersubjec-tive; culture would collapse into a heap without the ideational element. But layeredmaterializations of culture nonetheless recoil back upon life as arrangements to in-wardize, resources to deploy, limits to encounter, barriers to modify, and gridlocksto suffer.

Take marriage and family. They find expression through ambiva-lent habits of affection, obligation, and responsibility mobilized, condensed, and con-strained in institutional life. Do you want to get married, sharing at least a minimalunderstanding with others of marriage as a long-term bond between two adults withrights and obligations attached to it? It helps if a church or state sanctions the idea,houses a ceremony, attaches inheritance rights to it, provides assurances of supportfor the progeny in case of death; if the type of relationship you seek is represented inroutine ways in TV dramas and films; if the family you seek to build is consonant

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with the job prospects available to you and your spouse and the means of conceptionsanctioned by the state; if the military supports it; if your neighbors and family foldit into routine practices of friendship, sociality, holiday celebration, inheritance, andclub memberships; if insurance companies recognize it in spousal benefit packages;if teachers and administrators treat your child as the product of a legitimate mar-riage or birth procedure; if the laws of reproduction and divorce correspond to yourjudgment about the nature of the bond. These institutional conditions of realizationcarry constraints with them that stand over and against some ideas you and othersmay invest in the idea of marriage, as people often find when their conjugal aspirationsstretch coded materializations in the domains of religion, ethnicity, gender, age,work, class, or status. Do you seek a divorce? Time to run through the same litany.

The objective institutions that preexist us become infused to vari-able degrees into dispositions, perceptions, beliefs, and resistances we share and con-test with others. If thinking helps to compose culture, the objective dimension of cul-ture helps to compose thinking, making the relays and feedback loops that connectbodies, brains, and culture exceedingly dense. As you attend to the complex relaysjoining bodies, brains, and culture, the hubris invested in tight models of explana-tion and consummate narratives of interpretation becomes vivid.

Techniques of the self and micropolitics are critical to an expan-sive ethos of pluralism, as well as to more closed regimes at odds with such an ethos.They intervene at innumerable points “in between”: between subliminal attachmentand explicit belief; between implicit memory and explicit aspirations; between sharedbeliefs in one domain and those in others; between new dispositions surging into be-ing and linguistic practices imperfectly congruent with them; between constituencyaspirations to new rights and laws or traditions that forbid them; between legallysanctioned norms and counterpresumptions entrenched in family, school, neighbor-hood, work, or military practice; between the organization of work and aspirationsat odds with it; between corporate codes and patterns of gossip, rumor, and scandalthat enforce or subvert them; between energy sources mixed into economic life andcollective desires for a cleaner and more self-sustaining economy. By relational tech-niques of the self I mean choreographed mixtures of word, gesture, image, sound,rhythm, smell, and touch that help to define the sensibility in which your perception,thinking, identity, beliefs, and judgment are set. Relational techniques of the self aretypically applied at some of the above flash points. By micropolitics I mean such tech-niques organized and deployed collectively by professional associations, mass-mediatalk shows, TV and film dramas, military training, work processes, neighborhoodgangs, church meetings, school assemblies, sports events, charitable organizations,

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commercial advertising, child rearing, judicial practice, and police routines. It is notthat every institution is exhausted by micropolitics, but that the micropolitical di-mension of each is potent because of the critical functions the institution performsin organizing attachments, consumption possibilities, work routines, faith practices,child rearing, education, investment, security, and punishment.

Micropolitics operates below the threshold of large legislativeacts and executive initiatives, even as it ranges widely and sets conditions of possibil-ity for these more visible actions. Technique and micropolitics form connective linksjoining practices of memory, perception, thinking, judgment, institutional design,and political ethos. They do not form the only links. Far from it. Market, antimarketpractices (such as oligopolies, monopolies, and command systems), state decrees,and interstate agreements also play critical roles. I focus on these interstitial mediafor three reasons: first, because they play a critical role below the threshold of polit-ical visibility inside every domain of life, including the four institutional complexesjust listed; second, because they are underappreciated by intellectualists entrancedby unlayered images of thinking, thin conceptions of culture, and deliberative concep-tions of democracy; third, because those who do address them often join a thick imageof culture to a mandatory vision of national or civilizational unity inimical to the di-versity needed during a time when the pace of life has accelerated and territorial dis-tance has become compressed.

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Formatting Perception

in an intriguing essay, Samuel Weber discusses the effects of television on per-ception. He notes a difference, recorded in ordinary language, between perceivingthings in everyday life and “watching television.” The latter locution expresses aware-ness of how television news programs relay perceptions to us already organized byother people, institutions, and instruments. Television predigests what we watch. Inthis it is like photography and film, but

what distinguishes television from these other media is its power to combinesuch separation with the presentness associated with sense perception. Whattelevision transmits is not so much images, as is almost always argued. Itdoes not transmit representations but rather the semblance of presentation assuch, understood as the power not just to see and to hear but to place before us.Television thus serves as a surrogate for the body in that it allows for a cer-tain sense-perception to take place; but it does this in a way that no bodycan, for its perception takes place in more than one place at a time.1

Television compresses two places of perception into one; it there-fore is often unclear how much of the presentation is shaped by the medium andhow much by the events “covered.” We are aware of this, as the locution “watching

The Color of Perception

television” reveals. But we easily forget it while watching TV. The long-term effectof this combination, it is said, is the generation of skepticism and cynicism aboutpublic media, even as viewers remain vulnerable to media manipulation of experience.That may be why, Weber thinks, many people prefer sporting events and soap op-eras to news broadcasts and talk shows. These programs present people in contests,neighborhoods, hospitals, and police departments getting on with the loves, corrup-tion, generosities, and disasters of everyday life, as they were before so much experi-ence was compressed into that fateful relation between the screen and the viewer’seyeballs.

I concur in the common preference for soaps and sporting eventsover talk shows. I also think that the very difference between television and everydayperception Weber notes encourages people to ignore another connection betweenthese two practices. For action-oriented perceptions in everyday life are also sub-jected to a process of formatting that enables them to be perceptions. In both TV-mediated settings and action-oriented situations, a host of sensory material must bereduced and processed by a technocultural apparatus to render perception possible.The problem is that the veneer of objectivity that television commentators typicallypresent when they report the news merges with the cynicism of viewers about theprior organization of TV images to forestall popular thinking about the complexityof perception per se. Television could be a preeminent medium through which toexplore the formatting of perception. It could be a medium that both displays itscomplexity and teaches us how to work upon the processes that precede and enableperception.

Consider soaps and sitcoms, along merely one dimension. As asoap proceeds daily for weeks, the viewer moves back and forth effortlessly acrossseveral sub–story lines, with significant delays between specific scenes that stitch aparticular line together. A new scene might be informed by what occurred severalscenes before. In proceeding across interruptions from one scene to another, theviewer does not normally subject the previous scenes to explicit recollection. Theyform an implicit background, allowing the plot to unfold effortlessly. The past isfolded into current perception as virtual memory, enabling the story line or the joketo proceed. That is, the past operates on the present below the threshold of explicitmemory. Soaps and sitcoms can bring this constitutive feature of perception sharplyinto view precisely because we “watch” a set of movements occurring elsewhererather than move ourselves within these settings.

TV could teach a lot about how perception works. It, however,does not live up to its potential. Part of the reason is that its news programs and talk

T h e C o l o r o f P e r c e p t i o n

shows are dominated by talking heads who purport to report things as they are, evenas they sometimes expose “bias” in other shows or politicians. The cumulative resultof this combination is that simple objectivity is set up as the gold standard of percep-tion, while critics accuse each other of failing to live up to it. This game of mutualrecrimination set against a simple standard of objectivity, in turn, fosters the publiccynicism that many TV talking heads purport to resist.

Film may be more promising. Numerous films, played beforecaptive audiences in dark rooms, display the ubiquitous role of bodily affect in per-ception and judgment. The film theorist Steven Shaviro, for instance, explores how“our bodies” are “decisively altered” in the films of Bresson, Fassbinder, and Warholas we are “agitated and affected in new ways” by choreographed interplay amongcolor, music, rhythms, pace, words, and images.2 To take a recent example not reviewedby Shaviro, in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut we are subjected to a dream story setat a slow pace, with several scenes draped in red followed by scenes in purple andblack.3 We float passively through a kaleidoscope of events in which sexual desire ismobilized, translated into jealousy, suspended, and transfigured into a vague sense ofdanger. The overt sense of boredom infusing these experiences is punctuated by astrange feeling of tension. The boredom, you might say, partly expresses and partlycovers the lower layer of affect, for a feeling of boredom often signifies other ener-gies at work below the threshold of direct inspection. The torsion within this com-bination may encourage the audience to blame Kubrick for the boredom they feeland to give themselves credit for the thinking it enables. As that combination pro-ceeds we tend to forget the violence punctuating this unerotic adventure of desire,including what happens to the woman who helps Dr. Harford and the fate of thefriend who slips the sleepwalker into that tedious orgy. At least these off-scene eventswere not readily recalled by friends of mine who criticized the film for its boring andahistorical character. For, as reviewers could not help repeating, the erotic life set byKubrick in New York City is way out of sync with that operative in the New Yorkscene today. But that’s how dreaming works while your eyes are wide shut. Perhapsthe film blocks our vision as much as it does that of Dr. Bill Harford, as he wandersthrough a dreamy sea of affect from one untimely nonadventure to another. At anyrate, his nervous system communicates directly with ours as this dream world unfolds.The film places us in a position, after the fact, as it were, to ponder how our eyes canbecome wide shut too, even as we chuckle at Dr. Harford for his erotic innocence andcriticize Kubrick for the historical inaccuracy of his portrayals of New York City.

TV, film, everyday perception, modest experiments upon our-selves, phenomenologies of perception, and engagement with neurological studies of

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perception — perhaps attention to each site in relation to the others can engendermore thoughtful accounts of perception, make them more widely available, and evenprovide clues about how to intervene tactically in the perceptual process. As we seehow soaps draw upon virtual memories and films mobilize affective energy belowthe threshold of intellectual attention, we might discern more subtly how uncon-scious mobilizations of affective memory shape the color, tone, and direction ofeveryday perception. Henri Bergson can help.

Everyday perception, Bergson contended during the early daysof film and before the era of television, is constituted by the conjunction of two di-mensions. There is the event you encounter and the memory without recollectionthat help to translate the encounter into a perception. The conjunctions of “virtual”memory and sensory experience format perception. These are, in fact, the sameconjunctions that a soap opera deploys as it pulls several story lines across the sameprogram.

The role of memory is crucial, according to Bergson. It is not, asalready intimated, an explicit recollection that helps to define a percept. “Virtual” or“motor” memory does that, for “the past survives under two distinct forms; first, inmotor mechanisms; secondly in independent recollections.”4 Motor memory allowsan encounter to be organized into a perception because it subsists below explicitawareness as a repository of cultural life from the past. Perception is quick, as itmust be to inform action. The human capacity of explicit image recall is far too slowto keep up with the operational pace of perception as we walk, ramble, and runthrough action-oriented contexts. So virtual memories are called up rapidly, buttheir vital role in perception is lost to the perceiver sunk in the middle of action.Perception thus seems pure and unmediated to us. But it is not. It is a double-entryactivity guided by the concerns of possible action, not by a spectatorial quest to rep-resent an object in all its complexity. And the action possibilities mobilized throughthe rapid conjunctions between event and memory often lead to the summoning ofadditional virtual memories, adding new layers of complexity to perception.

Again, representation by a disinterested spectator would be tooslow and disinterested to organize perception. Indeed, the actual organization ofeveryday perception already verges on being too slow for the pace of life. Luckily,we have a crude, infraperceptual brain subsystem available to deal with high-speedsituations — as you will discover by reviewing, after the fact, your quick reaction to adriving emergency. In an emergency your reaction time must be quicker than thatallotted to image formation in regular perception. So in an emergency it is not onlythat explicit recollection gives way to virtual memory, explicit image formation gives

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way to rapid information processing without image. You respond in a split second to cuesprocessed below the threshold of image production. When the image comes intoview a half second later, you can then ascertain, if you are still alive, whether you didthe lifesaving thing when you jerked the steering wheel to the left even before form-ing a visual image of the oncoming car. In this instance the relatively slow, complexprocess of perception gives way to the lightning-fast, crude processing of the amyg-dala (a small, fast, intense little brain nodule connected to other brain regions andto direct, crude preperceptual experience). Let’s call the emergency percept infra-perception, because of its speed and its processing of information without visual im-agery. It happens all the time, as when you turn your car in a flash on the road orfreeze suddenly while walking in the woods, even before you have formed an explicitimage of a car or a snake. When that happens, it reveals something about the layeredcharacter of perception in more relaxed settings. For if the information processed inemergency reaction below the threshold of explicit image were subtracted from thevisual dimension of the image, everyday perception would be less rich and affectivelyimbued than it is. Infraperception thereby teaches us about the layered character of everyday perception, as well as about our impressive capacities to respond toemergencies.

Even ordinary perception moves pretty fast, faster than the con-scious mind can think. Because it is oriented to dictates of action in a world markedby speed, risk, surprise, need, and opportunity, perception subtracts from the incom-ing sensory material a surplus irrelevant to a small set of action possibilities. Percep-tion is subtractive, and the virtual memories mobilized during it help to determinewhat is subtracted. Part of the surplus subtracted persists as side perception, poten-tially available for recall in a different context.

Perception requires forgetfulness to be, first, forgetfulness of ele-ments in the incoming rush of sensory material not relevant to probable contexts ofaction; second, forgetfulness of cultural images drawn from the past that enter intothe virtual memory but do not assume the form of recollection. The subtractive or-ganization of perception involves double forgetfulness; but what is forgotten maynonetheless have effects upon future perception. Bergson summarizes a couple ofthese points. In perception, memory

has retained from the past only the intelligently coordinated movementswhich represent the accumulated efforts of the past; it recovers those past ef-forts, not in the memory-images which recall them, but in the definite orderand systematic character with which the actual movements take place. In

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truth it no longer represents our past to us, it acts it; and if it still deserves thename of memory, it is not because it conserves bygone images, but because itprolongs their useful effect into the present moment.5

It is fascinating sometimes to focus on the sounds, sights, andsmells of a scene or to wallow in your imagination. Bergson commends it as an excel-lent way to fold creativity into thinking and judgment. But wallowing can be dan-gerous in operational perception. That’s why, outside the possibilities opened up byfilm, TV, meditation, and brain/body experiments, it is not all that easy to learn howperception proceeds. Perception does not call attention to itself as it proceeds. It isoriented to action: “Perception, understood as we understand it, measures our pos-sible action upon things, and thereby, inversely, the possible action of things uponus.”6 The closer it is to action, the less expansive are the memories that constitute it.The more delay built into the link between perception and action, however, the morethe memories that form part of it can become recollections open to further reflec-tion and assessment. In these circumstances, the virtual memory image expands intoa series of explicit recollections.

Each virtual memory also has a characteristic charge of affectmixed into it.7 Virtual memories are pervaded by affective charges, ranging from asurge of panic through a radiant feeling of joy to myriad other possibilities. As theyare quickly mobilized to mediate an encounter — that is, to help translate a sensoryencounter into experience — the affective charges help to move thinking and judg-ment in some directions rather than others. Thinking and judgment are already wellunder way before they enter the picture as conscious processes.

It is not, again, that you first represent things and then add subjec-tive feelings. Perception is set in action contexts and organized through complex mix-tures of sensory encounter, virtual memory, and bodily affect. Sometimes blindingspeed is essential and infraperception takes precedence for a split second. At othertimes merely a fast pace does the job. As your affect-charged biocultural memorydeems particular elements unnecessary or unworthy, they are subtracted from themyriad sensory materials rushing in. Virtual memory is crucial. It is memory because itis real and exerts real effects, and it is virtual because it does not take the form of an ex-plicit image. But because “the lesson once learned bears upon it no mark which betraysits origin . . . in the past; it is part of my present, exactly like my habit of walking orof writing; it is lived and acted, rather than represented: I might believe it innate.”8

“I might believe it innate.” The logic of everyday perceptionseems innate to actors in the midst of action. The quick pace of action in relation to

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the relatively slow capacities of conscious processing make this necessary. But it ispossible to imagine a species, something like us, with quick capacities of explicitmemory retrieval. In us, consciousness is slow and linear; parallel processing is re-served for virtual memory prior to consciousness. Maybe this other species of over-men would sew parallel processing into the fabric of consciousness itself, transcend-ing thereby the crude limits of humans. They would seem like gods to us. Theywould also feel vividly those affects that move us below the level of feeling, perhapsthereby folding more pain, agony, and joy into their lives than we can endure on aregular basis. But because our operational capacities are limited in these ways, it iswise for us from time to time to dissect the elements that make up the organizationof perception — when, for instance, we are confronted with the cruel effects ourperceptual habits have on those marginalized or demonized by them, or when someingrained habits of perception foster debilitating anxiety or depression. In those cir-cumstances, and many others besides, it becomes ethically incumbent or prudentiallyimportant to examine the structure of perception and, sometimes, to devise strate-gies to work on the cultural dispositions now installed in it. Film can help.

Consider how the flashback in film can teach us about everydayperception if considered in conjunction with Bergson’s account of virtual memory.The value of the flashback is not only in representing the causality of the past on thepresent, although it is often used that way. It can also make visible to viewers howeach encounter insinuates into perception affectively imbued memories below thethreshold of explicit feeling and visibility. It can help us to appreciate the role of vir-tual memory in perception. The close-up adds another lesson, as it calls the viewer’sattention to side perceptions not placed at the focus of attention by situated actors,even as some of these subsidiary perceptions will survive as remainders to be calledup at a later time. It can also alert us to threshold moments in the past that did notseem important then, but now turn out to have been critical to a shift or turn in thetrajectory of events.

Bergson himself thought film was too mechanical to address thecomplexity of perception; but he made this assessment early in its development. It infact is an excellent medium through which to address and test his theory. In BeingJohn Malkovich, to take another instance, the flashback is superseded by the artificeof other human beings actually crawling into Malkovich’s head to turn his percep-tions, desires, and actions in new directions. In this way the film literalizes the trian-gular character of sexual desire, making it available for humorous engagement andcloser inspection. Such a literalization of the flashback, as it might be called, accen-tuates the dim perception you sometimes have of something alien inhabiting your

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desire. It renders such disturbing or delicious experiences more available for reflec-tion. So when a child emerges as the product of heated sex involving Malkovich, thewoman who seduces him, and the woman infatuated with her who crawled intoMalkovich’s head to participate in the action, subliminal elements circulating in per-ception and desire become more tangible to us. This includes the uncanny sense byMalkovich that his desire is choreographed by strange forces outside his control.The conjunction between film technique and Bergsonian theory, in turn, might en-courage reflection on fugitive features of everyday perception that could otherwiseremain in the dark.

At a recent gathering in Baltimore, several graduate students re-counted a story about a raucous event they had attended. At first I wished I had beenthere. There was a lot of drinking, dancing, and loud music at this event, held in arow house on a quiet street. The police appeared to quiet things down. Studentssmoking outside were ordered back into the house. Once inside, they were summar-ily ordered to reverse course and go outside. As she walked down stairs she had justwalked up, a graduate student said, “I know what you are doing, and I will not be in-timidated by your tactics.” “Okay, you’re the one,” an officer announced, and shewas placed under arrest. She was handcuffed and led to a police car down the street.The other students milled around, wondering what to do. Then the police car movedto the front of the house, the lights inside the car were turned on so that the handcuffedyoung woman was visible to everyone, and the car sat there for twenty minutes.

It seemed to the revelers, as I prefer to call them, that the copswere inviting them to protest so that new members could be added to the arrest list.They stopped short of doing so, even as they were plagued by guilt for doing noth-ing. The woman was taken to the police station and strip-searched; she was thencharged with disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and disobeying an officer. Shewas kept in jail overnight. At last count, she had racked up about fifteen hundreddollars in legal fees.

We were silent for a moment after this story drew to a close. Weallowed ourselves, I guess, to absorb the feelings of anger and anxiety surging up asthe event was recounted. Perhaps we also resisted, momentarily, the temptation toplace it under one or another cliché. “So, finally a student faces real life.” Or “Thecops have a difficult time keeping order.” Finally, I uttered a third banality: “Theother students were smart not to take the bait; those cops showed how they are freeto act arbitrarily while protecting their deniability.” “Yeah,” the storyteller said. “ButI don’t like the effect the whole thing has had on me.”


I don’t like it either. The choreography of the event colors fearof the police and anger against them into the texture of perception. It takes a toll onthose who were there and on others who hear about it as it spreads, fanned by addi-tions, like wildfire across the campus. Now some students tread more carefully inthe presence of the police. Indeed, one’s approach to authority in general may becolored more darkly as this event merges into one’s implicit urban memory bank.

As I awoke slowly the morning after hearing this story, I foundmyself rehearsing in no specific order a series of encounters with the police, startingwhen I was a working-class boy in a medium-sized city. About, for instance, the copswho refused to intervene when factory workers beat a fellow worker who lived nextdoor to me nearly to death the day after the House Un-American Activities Commit-tee came to town to expose him as a former communist. Or the cops who harassed meafter I chuckled when one of them slammed on his brakes awkwardly to avoid hit-ting the car in front of him. Or a few years later when I was pulled over after a peacerally by policemen assigned to monitor it. Or the time I was arrested at a peace demon-stration and made vividly aware of the power of the police who arrested us andpacked us into a holding area. A thin sheet of time regained. As these affect-imbuedrecollections floated by in nonchronological order, I sensed how they had formed asheet of virtual memory that had entered into my response the night before. I alsosaw how hesitant I was to talk about the effects of such past experiences on thecolor of my perception because of the intensity of affect attached to them.

My experiences pale by comparison to those of young AfricanAmerican males in the inner city, as an incident that took place a few weeks latershows. Police officers in the same city asserted that it had been necessary for them toshoot an African American addict they had captured after he had stolen a car, althoughseveral witnesses claimed the police first handcuffed him, tripped him to make himfall, and then shot him in the back of the head as he pleaded for his life. That case is“under investigation.”

According to Kandinsky, if “two circles are drawn and paintedrespectively yellow and blue, a brief contemplation will reveal in the yellow a spread-ing movement out from the center, and a noticeable approach to the spectator. Theblue, on the other hand, moves into itself, like a snail retreating into its shell, anddraws away from the spectator.”9 My perception of the Baltimore police force is col-ored blue.

This is a minor moment in the micropolitics of perception. Suchevents accumulate to color perception, even as they are variously absorbed by people

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in different subject positions. It is easy to see how white, middle-class suburbanitescould consolidate such events into a law-and-order mentality. Or how more extremeversions of them in the lives of African American youths could accumulate into apervasive feeling of urban rage. One day a riot will erupt over a minor incident. Per-haps a tough jury decision, reached by middle-class citizens who have absorbed suchstories into their perceptions of crime, police conduct, and urban danger, will pullthe trigger. The police bring considerable street knowledge to the micropolitics ofperception; you hear bits of it in play when they phone you to solicit contributionsto the police fund. The producers of soaps also have such street knowledge. The restof us may still have things to learn.

In the student arrest case, some witnesses want to testify in court,to expose police arbitrariness and perhaps to fortify themselves against the accumu-lating effects of silence. But the cops involved understand that desire. The student’slawyer, the judge, the police, and the student’s concerns about time and money arelikely to converge to settle the matter out of court. An object lesson has already beenabsorbed, although imperfectly and incompletely. Another thing individuals can doin such instances is to use the venues available to publicize the accumulating effectsof such micropolitical events on the color of perception. I will reserve until laterchapters the dicey question of how to work on a structure of perception already in-stalled in an individual or constituency.

The Neurophysiology of Perception

The account of perception offered by Bergson, who was closely attuned to the bio-logical research of his day, gains considerable support from contemporary researchinto its neurophysiology. We have already tacked a bit of that research onto his accountby introducing the amygdala, for although this intense, crude brain region coalesceswith things Bergson says about the color of perception, it was not an object of researchwhen he wrote.

To see how contemporary research supports Bergson’s view of themixing of cultural experience into neural networks in the organization of perception,consider the Held/Heims (now) classic experiment with cats. Two batches of kittenswere first raised in the dark and then exposed to light through carefully varied con-ditions. Both groups were exposed to the same field of visual possibilities, but thosein the first group were allowed to coordinate the visual field with their olfactory andtactile experience as they moved, whereas the kittens in the second group were car-ried around in baskets as they were exposed to the “same” illuminated environment.

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When the animals were released after a few weeks of this treatment, the firstgroup of kittens behaved normally, but those who had been carried aroundbehaved as if they were blind; they bumped into objects and fell over edges.This beautiful study supports the enactive view that objects are not seen bythe visual extraction of features but rather by the visual guidance of action.10

The cats in the first group synthesized visual, touch, and olfac-tory experience as they moved through their environment, while those in the secondgroup were unable to do so. That is why adults who have sight surgically created afternever having been able to see have such a difficult time forming operational images.The accumulation of such experiments, with both animals and humans, has drawnmany neuroscientists and some cognitive scientists away from the representationalmodels of mind that informed cognitive science in the 1970s. They are movingcloser to the “enactive” model adopted by the authors of The Embodied Mind andprefigured in the work of Bergson, James, and Merleau-Ponty.

Antonio Damasio, like the authors just cited, also seconds manyof the things Bergson says. He situates them in contemporary research into relationsbetween the brain system and bodily zones. Damasio seems unaware of how closelyhis account tracks Bergson’s theory, but he is alert to a debt to William James. AndJames and Bergson formed a mutual admiration society in the early part of the twen-tieth century.11

Damasio, for instance, connects the recollection of a past eventto the affect attached to it. He also emphasizes how memory in the midst of action isdispositional rather than recollective.

Dispositions are records which are dormant and implicit rather than activeand explicit . . . ; moreover, the memories also contain records of the obligateemotional reaction to the object. As a consequence when we recall an object,when we allow dispositions to make their implicit information explicitly, weretrieve not just sensory data, but also accompanying motor and emotionaldata.12

Affect and the “motor image” are as important to Damasio’s ren-dering of perception as they are to Bergson. Damasio has participated in studies, tobe reviewed in chapter 4, that measure the brief half second between the beginningof a percept and its consolidation, during which much of the preliminary work isdone. In perception, Damasio says, you become aware of many things in the world,but

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what you do not ever come to know directly is the mechanism behind thediscovery, the steps that need to take place behind the seemingly open stageof your mind in order for core consciousness of an object’s image to ariseand make the image yours. . . . The time elapsed is minuscule if measured bya stopwatch, but it is actually quite extensive if you think of it from the per-spective of the neurons which make it all possible and whose units are somuch smaller than that of your conscious mind.13

Damasio’s story about a patient with “ventromedial prefrontaldamage” illustrates how important affect is to memory and perception. The patienthas lost access to what Damasio calls “somatic markers” in everyday situations, al-though his powers of analysis remain intact. These cultural markers inscribed in vis-ceral process form the basis of virtual or dispositional memory. But the capacity toinvoke such markers is damaged in his case. Less robustly imbued with markersthrough which to narrow decision issues to a manageable set of options, this poorguy finds it necessary to reason through every situation as if he were a rational-choicetheorist.

His affect/judgment impairment served him well when he wasnegotiating an icy patch of road one night. Other drivers had to override a sociallyingrained instinct to slam on their brakes as their cars slid on the ice, but, in the ab-sence of a panic-stricken impulse, our hero calmly and deliberately steered his carover the icy patch. Awareness of his goal coalesced with a diminution of affect towork well this time around. Things got tougher, however, when he was asked to se-lect one of two dates to return to the clinic.

For the better part of a half-hour, the patient enumerated reasons for andagainst each of the two dates: previous engagements, proximity to other en-gagements, possible meteorological conditions, virtually anything that onecould reasonably think about concerning a simple date. Just as calmly as hehad driven over the ice . . . he was now walking us through a tiresome cost-benefit analysis, and endless outlining and fruitless comparison of optionsand possible consequences. It took enormous discipline to listen to all of thiswithout pounding on the table and telling him to stop, but we finally did tellhim, quietly, that he should come on the second of the alternative dates. . . .He simply said, “That’s fine.”14

If you have attended many faculty meetings, you might be im-pressed with the patience Damasio and his colleagues showed in this instance. Thepatient’s behavior, says Damasio, “is a good example of the limits of pure reason.”15

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If he had the ability to consult somatic markers acquired through a previous historyof cultural transactions, the question would have been framed for him in its timeli-ness and living significance before he began to deliberate; factors irrelevant to the de-cision could have been subtracted to reduce the number of considerations invoked inexplicit decision. This patient is condemned to the infinite imperative of calculativereasoning because he has lost the affect-imbued markers appropriate to contextualdecision making. Some rational-choice theorists may be pushed to similar resultsbecause they cannot bear the agony of small decisions.

But what is a somatic marker? It is a culturally mobilized, corpo-real disposition through which affect-imbued, preliminary orientations to perceptionand judgment scale down the material factored into cost-benefit analyses, principledjudgments, and reflective experiments. If Damasio is right, somatic markers formthe seedbed of dispositional memory. A somatic marker operates below the thresh-old of reflection; it mixes culture and nature into perception, thinking, and judgment;and it folds gut feelings into these mixtures. “Somatic markers do not deliberate forus. They assist the deliberation by highlighting some options (either dangerous orfavorable), and eliminating them rapidly from subsequent consideration.” They “as-sist the process of sifting through such a wealth of detail” and thereby “reduce theneed for sifting because they provide an automated detection of the scenario com-ponents that are likely to be relevant.”16

Such markers might be triggered when you are invited to a sexu-ally attractive friend’s home at the end of a casual evening. Time is short, and youcannot address all the considerations relevant to the decision. You don’t, perhaps,ask yourself in detail whether the event may carry future burdens with it, whetheryour partner would be disturbed upon learning about it, whether you are discontentedin your current relationship, whether your future friendship with the colleague couldbe damaged, and so on. You respond to a series of implicit, affect-imbued judgmentsgathered from the past before deliberating briefly.

Somatic markers provide ambiguous help in the midst of deci-sion. They make it possible to perceive and decide in a timely manner. But they alsofold into these subtractions and accentuations elements that sometimes turn out tobe dangerous, unwise, or cruel. You might, for instance, jerk the wheel to the leftinto an oncoming car. Or turn away the friend merely because a racial stereotypeclicks in at the possibility of intimacy. Somatic markers make decisions easier andfaster for human beings whose chamber of consciousness is slow in pace and limitedin capacity. They can also spur new trains of thought. But, for these very reasons,the weight of somatic markers also generates a need for tactics and techniques by

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which to work on them when their compressions of experience become too restric-tive or destructive.

It is critical to understand that somatic markers are not equiva-lent to biologically wired predispositions. They have intersubjective and linguisticelements mixed into them. When European Jews went through the Holocaust, forinstance, the trauma left effects on several layers of collective experience. The termHolocaust became a way to draw up those memories, both virtually in the course ofaction and in explicit recollection. The term both calls up complex memories on thehigher, linguistic register and taps into the visceral dimension of trauma, an intenseset of feelings that gather in the gut, the muscles, and the pallor of the skin. Whenpeople with such intense collective memories face new circumstances that triggerthem, a set of dispositions to perception, feeling, interpretation, and action are calledinto play. Media such as TV and film, as they mix music, background sounds, words,and visual images together, are particularly adept at invoking such dispositions, andalso at working upon them. Attention to the techniques these media deploy cansharpen our perceptions of how such effects are invoked and teach us how to workon ourselves to refine their shape or intensity.

Once somatic markers are added to your ledger, both rational-choice theory and the reduction of culture to an unlayered set of intersubjectiveconcepts and beliefs are thrown into jeopardy. The model of “deliberative democ-racy,” loved by many political theorists, requires modification too. Culturally preor-ganized charges shape perception and judgment in ways that exceed the picture ofthe world supported by the models of calculative reason, intersubjective culture,and deliberative democracy. They show us how linguistically complex brain regionsrespond not only to events in the world but also, proprioceptively, to cultural habits,skills, memory traces, and affects mixed into our muscles, skin, gut, and cruder brainregions. Since we will shortly engage an intersubjective model that flattens out thelayered texture of thinking and culture, let me now intimate the implication thatDamasio’s theory of somatic markers carries for empiricism and rational-choicetheory. Here is what the neuroscientist himself says about how the complex relaysand feedback loops connecting brain, body, and culture disrupt predictive models ofexplanation:

Moreover, the brain is not likely to predict how all the commands — neuraland chemical, but especially the latter — will play out in the body, becausethe play-out and the resulting states depend on local biochemical contextsand on numerous variables within the body itself which are not fully repre-sentable. What is played out in the body is constructed anew, moment by

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moment. . . . The brain probably cannot predict the exact landscapes the bodywill assume after it unleashes a barrage of neural and chemical signals on thebody no more than it can predict all the imponderables of a specific situationas it unfolds in real life and real time.17

Memory and Action

When you fold Bergson’s understanding of the role that human mobility plays inperception into Damasio’s exploration of somatic markers, you emerge with a layeredappreciation of how perception functions. When that perspective is joined to the in-sights of some film directors, the credibility and availability of these ideas themselvescan be augmented. Take, for instance, the layered image of perception, thinking, andjudgment embodied in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.

The film opens with a newsreel about Kane, who has just died.The reporter tells us in objective voice that Kane was a populist, the left-leaningowner of a major newspaper, a scandalmonger, a candidate for governor, a charis-matic man, and so on, whose life fell apart when he was caught by his opponent inan affair with a young woman during the middle of his campaign for governor. Thenewsreel recapitulates the strategies of scandalmongering through superficial objec-tivity that Kane himself had popularized in the mainstream press. It is played, as itturns out, to reporters in a pressroom. As the reel ends, the reporters’ editor, impa-tient with the veneer of superficial objectivity governing it, assigns a reporter to findout the truth about Kane. Since Kane uttered the word “Rosebud” just before hedied, the editor concludes that this is the enigma to be deciphered.

What is Rosebud? The name of a lover? An enchanting childhoodexperience? An erogenous body zone? A flower that never blossomed? Through aseries of long flashbacks, each mediated by an interested witness to a time in Kane’slife, the mystery is probed. No flashback simply presents a slice of Kane’s past. Eachis filtered through the experience of someone invested one way or another in his life.That would be the case for Kane, too; his own flashbacks would be invested withcurrent feelings and concerns inflecting how the past is called into the present. Eachmemory of the witnesses, then, is itself also shaped to some degree by the affect-imbued context in which it arises. The film enacts Bergson’s view that the past isconstituted not simply out of the present that it was but during the time it is calledinto being.

The investments of the witnesses are crudely represented in aposter advertising the film. It places Kane in the middle, surrounded by severalfaces: “I love him,” says a demure woman; “He’s a Saint,” says the review editor;

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“He’s a genius,” says the editor he replaced; “He’s crazy,” says his onetime guardianand banker; “He’s a dirty dog,” says the politician who destroyed him; “I hate him,”says the sultry woman looking down from the top left column.18

Yes, Citizen Kane presents a model of perspectivalism in whichno single perspective rises to a place of simple objectivity. But the subjectively medi-ated flashbacks may also accumulate to form an intersubjective composite exceedingthe perspective of any single witness. Together, they put us into filtered contactwith selected aspects of Kane’s past as they come into play in his later life. But be-cause this composite fails to penetrate the mystery of Rosebud, the assemblage offlashbacks works against the agenda of deep explanation the editor had in mind (andthat often governs the use of the flashback). So we must keep digging.

It is unwise to allow the (now) familiar and pertinent theme ofperspectivalism to overwhelm Welles’s corollary attempt through flashbacks, shiftsin perspective, and depth-of-field shots to portray the complex, layered role that thepast plays in the present. For through Citizen Kane, we now come to terms more vividlywith another level of the virtual. The virtual subsists not only as action-orientedmemories below explicit recollection at the moment, but also as intensive traces andfragments that have effects on judgment and consciousness in new encounters with-out themselves being susceptible in principle to explicit recollection. Bergson wouldagree. We now engage three layers of memory: (a) explicit memories called up by anexisting situation, (b) potential recollections that operate implicitly in action con-texts because time is too short to pull them up as recollections, and (c) effects of thepast on the present that cannot take the form of explicit recollection, even whentime is available. These latter affect-imbued traces cannot be recollected not becausethey are repressed, but because the fragmentary form they assume does not coincidewith that of an articulable thought or coherent image. This, perhaps, is one shapetaken by somatic markers.

Let’s see how Welles addresses this third layer. Citizen Kane drawstoward a close when a worker, visible to viewers but not to the reporter assigned tothe case, picks up a sled and tosses it into the fire along with a mess of other itemscollected by the deceased millionaire. We are then treated to a penultimate scene inwhich the name “Rosebud” becomes visible on the sled as it goes up in flames, fol-lowed by a scene in which black smoke billows from the chimney of the desertedmansion in which Kane lived his last years. Have we — the viewers — now penetratedthe enigma withheld from the reporter and witnesses?

The image of the sled may flash us back to an earlier scene, oneorganized through “depth of field.”19 In this scene — presented as a long flashback

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by Kane’s onetime guardian and banker — intensive lighting at the deep back centerdraws the eye to a window through which a boy can be seen rollicking in the snowon his sled. The intense lighting in the diminutive background is set off from amiddle range of depth in natural lighting, where Kane’s father watches belligerentlyfrom the left as Kane’s mother and future guardian settle arrangements at the frontright for Kane’s adoption and introduction into a more urbane life. Louis Giannettisummarizes some other elements in this depth-of-field shot:

In this scene . . . eight year old Charles plays with his sled outside in the snowwhile his future is being determined by his mother and Thatcher. The boy’sfather watches impotently, sputtering a few feeble protests. The mise enscene is compartmentalized into twos, with the wall serving as the verticaldividing line. Kane senior and young Charles are grouped to the left; Thatcherand the severe Mrs. Kane dominate the right lower half, their pens poised tosign the contract that will soon separate Charles from his parents.20

The shot makes use of tripartite depth division and two-part ver-tical division, with the viewer’s eye drawn to a diminutive, intensely lighted scene ofthe young boy at the deepest point outside the window while a conversation abouthim proceeds in less dramatic light in front view in the house. When the scene playsearly in the film, we learn that the boy is about to be separated from his parents andhis home. When we flash back to it as the sled goes up in flames, we might hope fora moment (unless film critics have already taken that hope away) that it contains thekey to the meaning of Rosebud, a key none of the protagonists has been able to turn.We now believe that this fork in Kane’s life entered actively into his later decisions.Can we finally decipher Rosebud?

No. The fork does set the table for future perceptions, judgments,and actions by Kane, but it does not by itself determine them. When, for instance,he insists that Susan — the woman he married after their illicit affair was exposedduring his electoral campaign — pursue a singing career for which she is ill suited,we might comprehend that response in relation to the early life from which he waspulled away. But a number of other responses might have spoken to the fugitive ex-perience of disconnection as well. Second, when his mother, played by the severeAgnes Moorehead, signed the adoption contract against her husband’s wishes, shemade it clear to both men (although not to Kane frolicking in the snow) that her pri-mary motive for doing so was to protect her son from future abuse by his volatile fa-ther. If Rosebud represented to Kane an idyllic world that might have been — and itis not perfectly clear that it did — it cannot now do so for us.

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Each time an element in Kane’s past is brought into view, it pointsto a diffuse, affective horizon beyond it. For instance, because we now surmise thatother tensions and ambiguities would have been set into motion if Kane had remainedwith his parents, the snow scene loses its aura as a moment of fullness lost. As eachangle of recollection is followed and rendered fuzzy by the next we are eventuallypressed to conclude both that the film makes some sense of Kane and that it pointsto efficacious sheets of past working upon Kane’s life that exceed anyone’s capacityof recollection from any perspective — including Kane’s and ours. Each fork is fil-tered through explicit recollections, but each also points to virtual effects installed be-low available first-person recollection or authoritative, third-person reconstruction.

Are these latter nonevents, then? In some sense they are, forthey can’t be represented or articulated. But in another sense they are not. Althoughno one captures them in a recollection image, they can still have effects in the pre-sent when triggered by new encounters. Such affective markers, unsusceptible to ex-plicit recollection, might also be susceptible to some degree to being worked uponby tactical means.

In Citizen Kane the eventual placement of the viewer in a supe-rior position to that of the protagonists accentuates the enigma of Rosebud.21 Thistactic, like the use of multiple flashbacks in relation to stories recounted by differentwitnesses, unsettles the perspectival privilege assumed by the viewer. Rather thancompleting an explanatory account that had been fragmentary, the flashbacks, depth-of-field shots, and surprising shifts in perspectival privilege encourage us to thinkmore actively about the role that effective, enigmatic sheets of past play in thinkingand perception. The Wellesian engagement with depth becomes linked to apprecia-tion of the layered effectivity of the past on the present rather than to pursuit of suf-ficient knowledge, deep explanation, or narrative integrity. Responding to this de-velopment, you may ponder just what prompts you to insist that people, things, andevents must be susceptible in principle to deep explanation.

The film will infect your dream life, if you give it a chance, partlybecause its depth explorations do not issue in deep explanation. Kane’s past is trackedby virtual remainders that color his perceptions, inflect his thoughts, and enter intohis decisions. Rosebud signifies the complex effectivity of the past. Such a conclu-sion is supported by the presentation, in later scenes, of the reporter from rear view,of Kane with eyes averted and face partly in shadow, of the loss of resonance inKane’s voice, and by the ominous portrayals of buildings and places as mere edificesand cluttered spaces. At the very end, the film may flash your recollection to a signat the opening scene in front of the castle. It says, “No Trespassing.” It does not say,


“Irrelevant.” That recollection, too, is inflected by the new circumstances in whichit is pulled up.

Welles is Bergsonian, and Bergson delineates a layered concep-tion of memory and perception anticipating Wellesian cinema. Of course, Freudcould be invoked to interpret Rosebud. Indeed, it is difficult not to do so today. Butit may therefore be wise to set Freudian theory to the side at first, just so it does notautomatically monopolize the possibilities of interpretation. We will explore Freud’stheory of primal guilt and memory traces in chapter 4. Bergson’s focus on the rapidpace of perception allows us to see how memory, perception, thinking, and culturecan be layered without having immediate recourse to heavy explanatory theory.Bergson suggests how “memory traces,” as Freud calls them, might operate even with-out expressing primordial guilt (Freud’s archaic traces) or, often enough, without be-ing processed through a repression machine. As we shall see, the Bergsonian inter-pretation opens the door to a wide range of tactics by which to work on affectivememories that help to structure perception and judgment. Freud’s theory — less at-tentive to the rapid tempo of human perception and unalert to productive potential-ities in “religious experience” — limits too-stringently positive possibilities of tech-nical intervention into the habitus of the self and the habits of larger collectives. Putanother way, Freud encloses memory traces within a deep interpretation in which heknows the source and shape of the most archaic traces, even though those beset bythem do not. The perspective developed here refuses for ethical reasons to join theappreciation of layering and depth to the hubris of deep, authoritative interpreta-tion. We may foster positive experimentation in ethics and politics by joining a lay-ered conception of memory, perception, thinking, and culture to modest schemataof interpretation and explanation. In forging an intertext that includes Welles, Berg-son, and Damasio, we address the complexity of perception, and we anticipate howcreative thought might be spurred by contingent encounters between virtual mem-ory and new events.

The Texture of Culture

Let’s test this layered account of memory, perception, and judgment against a con-ception of culture that calls it into question. In Our America: Nativism, Modernism,and Pluralism, Walter Benn Michaels argues that not only nationalists and nativistsadopt racial images of culture; cultural pluralists, against their highest intentions, doso too. How can this be? The problem is that cultural pluralists, trying to match na-tivists in their appreciation of the texture of culture and the corollary depth of identity,inevitably insert a biological concept of race into the base of culture. The nativists

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prize racial purity while the pluralists seek diversity. But the way the latter constitutedeep pluralism plunges them into the cauldron of pluralist racism.

Culture, for Michaels, consists of “concepts, beliefs and practices.”You can get a good sense of how layered his understanding of these media is by at-tending to his critique of cultural pluralists. Michaels says that cultural pluralistswho play up an obligation of each constituency to come to terms with its own iden-tity, or to express that identity in relations with other groups, or to be loyal to it, pourinto the injunctions “obligation,” “express,” and “loyal” a racial conception of cul-ture. They pluralize race under the pretense of eliminating it. The pluralists are dri-ven to this result, he says, through their desire to avoid a “universalism” that theyfear fosters an intolerance of “difference.”

It is their anxiety about universalism that gets the pluralists intotrouble, for to avoid its apparent defects they postulate deep cultural differences“disconnected . . . from one’s actual beliefs and practices.” That is, to give depth toculture they incorporate a biological element into its composition that exceeds theconcepts and beliefs of participants. “Pluralism makes this disconnection possible byderiving one’s beliefs and practices from one’s cultural identity instead of equatingone’s beliefs and practices with one’s cultural identity.”22 Here is the dilemma in anutshell:

The commitment to difference itself represents a theoretical intensificationrather than diminution of racism, an intensification that has nothing to dowith feelings of tolerance or intolerance toward other races and everythingto do with the conceptual apparatus of pluralist racism.23

The critique of “the politics of difference” has several implica-tions. One is the restoration of a universalism that Michaels himself neither devel-ops nor defends in positive terms. It is established, rather, by elimination of theother options he recognizes as possible candidates. They don’t work because theypresuppose a racial conception of identity that is both unwanted by pluralists and atodds with the best biological knowledge available today. To accept this pluralist con-ception of culture, if you are a pluralist, is thus to get entangled in a performativecontradiction: you implicitly presuppose a conception of race that you explicitly reject.

Michaels first reduces every nonracial conception of culture to aset of concepts and beliefs and then shows, through a series of performative contra-dictions, that each deep conception of pluralism engenders a conception the plural-ists themselves can’t endorse explicitly. The charge of committing a performativecontradiction becomes the most potent weapon of cultural critique in Michaels’s ar-

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mory. If culture were actually constituted as Michaels defines it, the weapon wouldwork effectively. Artfully and relentlessly pursued, it would reduce the contenders tothe explicit nativists and implicit racists he opposes and the universalism he endorses.The pluralists would be compelled to adopt his view to avoid implicit racism. AndMichaels is very artful . . . within the range of alternatives he acknowledges.

Indeed, a visceral desire to translate the performative contradic-tion into a master weapon of cultural critique may be one of the things that pressesMichaels to give such unlayered readings of “concepts and beliefs,” “culture,” and“difference.” For if that weapon is to win clear-cut victories, it helps to start with asketch of culture in which the concepts and beliefs that constitute it are clean andflat enough to be fitted into tightly structured arguments. It also helps to act as ifeverybody must either accept this rendering of culture in the name of clarity ordeepen culture through the addition of a biological conception of race.

But a funny thing now happens. It now appears that you canavoid pluralist racism only by enacting a culture as flat as the celluloid world ofPleasantville before color, texture, ambiguity, paradox, affect, and passion are foldedinto it by refugees from the real, embodied, noncelluloid world. Perhaps a reconsid-eration of the alternatives admitted into discussion by Michaels will help to restore alittle color to culture.

Take “difference.” On my reading, difference is layered. It oper-ates on several registers, assuming a different level of complexity on each. On oneregister it is a defined minority that deviates from the majority practice. On a second,it is a minority that varies from other constituencies in a setting where there is nodefinitive majority. On a third, it is that in an identity (subjective or intersubjective)that is obscured, suppressed, or remaindered by its own dominant tendencies — as inthe way devout Christians may be inhabited by fugitive forgetfulness and doubts notbrought up for review in daily conversations or in church, or in the way militantatheists may tacitly project life forward after death when not concentrating on thebelief that consciousness stops with the death of the body. The third register of dif-ference fades into a fourth, in which surpluses, traces, noises, and charges in andaround the concepts and beliefs of embodied agents express proto-thoughts andjudgments too crude to be conceptualized in a refined way but still intensive and ef-fective enough to make a difference to the selective way judgments are formed, porousarguments are received, and alternatives are weighted. And in a layered, textured cul-ture, cultural argument is always porous. Some of the elements in such a fugitive fundmight be indicated, but not of course represented, by those noises, stutters, gestures,looks, accents, exclamations, gurgles, bursts of laughter, gestures, and rhythmic or

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irrhythmic movements that inhabit, punctuate, inflect, and help to move the worldof concepts and beliefs recognized by Michaels.

Michaels, however, will be wary of the third register of difference,and he must avoid the fourth like the plague.24 Not by disproving it — for it is notclear that he can do so without drawing in advance upon the very model of culturehe supports, along with the master mode of argument it makes available to him — butby ignoring, dismissing, or laughing off its expressions and projections by those whoare more impressed than he with the animal in us, the spirituality in us, or both. Hewill say, perhaps, “If it is unknowable, it can’t be articulated,” supposing in that veryformulation an equivalence between articulation and efficacy that is up for discussion.Or, if he follows the path of dismissal, he may well draw upon cultural resources thatexceed his official model of how cultural critique proceeds. Would that be a perfor-mative contradiction?

Suppose that Michaels were to project difference, in one of itsmodalities, as a virtual reality, that is, in Bergson’s terms, a real force that has effectson actual feelings, conduct, judgments, and identity but does not itself take the formof a feeling or a recollection image. Or suppose, more modestly, he were to grantthis rendering of difference as a contestable reading of a register of cultural life,even though he finds it too messy and unreachable by knowledge to endorse himself.Now the tight connection he has crafted between a culture reduced to concepts andbeliefs and the power of the performative contradiction loosens up considerably.The loss of the former reduces the power of the latter in eliminating competitors tohis view. For you can now have a deep, layered image of culture without invokingthe idea of race to do so. Michaels can disagree with this possibility, but he has nowforfeited the sort of arguments needed to eliminate it decisively.

He might now engage with more appreciation a cluster of theistssuch as Augustine, James, Bergson, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Taylor, as well asnontheists such as Epicurus, Deleuze, Derrida, Butler, Foucault, Nietzsche, and(perhaps) Damasio, who joyfully proclaim that sometimes the encounter with para-dox, contradiction, aporia, and ambiguity points to a register subsisting beneathclose conceptual discernment that nonetheless has effects on the color of perception,the texture of action, and the priority invested in some porous arguments over oth-ers. From these perspectives, a performative contradiction is not always a defeat —although it does call for further elaboration of the issue in question. It might pointto layers subsisting below disembodied conceptions of cultural life. Augustine treatsthe paradox of time as a sign of our dependence on God, and Nietzsche treats theparadox of truth (“Suppose truth is a woman”) as a sign of our implication in fugitive

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layers of intersubjectivity that exceeds our best powers of representation. Now cul-ture involves practices in which the porosity of argument is inhabited by more noise,unstated habit, and differential intensities of affect than adamant rationalists acknowl-edge. The point, at least for me and several of the figures listed above, is not simplyto articulate that which exceeds articulation, for each attempt to do that is by defin-ition to move and modify that which is articulated. It is sometimes to draw creativesustenance from this fugitive register of being, as Augustine does in one way andNietzsche in another. At other times it is to work by artful means to magnify, enrich,or modify elements in an affective register not reachable by argument or consciousregulation alone. Now you enter a domain in which technique, faith, cultivation,and conversion infiltrate practices of argument, critique, and deliberation. But thismay sound a lot like noise to Michaels, as indeed it is.

In these latter renderings of culture, concepts and beliefs play asignificant role, but they are layered into corporeal/spiritual contexts that render itimpossible to reduce them entirely to disembodied tokens of argumentation. Cul-ture has multiple layers, with each layer marked by distinctive speeds, capacities, andlevels of linguistic complexity. And the relations between the layers are mediated bynoise — just as a bit of static can help a single note to stand out more sharply, if thestatic is not too loud or too soft.

Let me identify a few points at which I concur with Michaels. Iagree that an enclave model of pluralism, in which each constituency is obligatedonly to the group from which it springs, misreads the multiple sources from whichoperative identities spring and overstates the obligations one has to one’s past. I alsoadd that it depreciates the politics of pluralization by which new identities are peri-odically propelled onto the regime of cultural life from a place below the register ofdefined identities, although I am uncertain whether Michaels can concur with me inthis critique of enclave pluralism.25

Michaels also helps us to see how a flat conception of conceptsand beliefs joined to a quest for deep identity readily degenerates into a racial pictureof culture. I agree, too, that some models of pluralism do slide toward a conceptionof race, even though it is possible to defend a deep, layered pluralism that does notdo so. Finally, I concur that concepts, beliefs, and practices play pivotal roles in theconsolidation of culture, although I understand these media to be both layered intheir degrees of complexity and mixed with other elements that enable and exceedthem.

Michaels’s tendency to reduce culture to disembodied conceptsand beliefs may also flow from a drive to identify the biological with the genetic and

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the corporeal with the fixed. Hence the reduction of deep pluralism to racism. But,as we have already begun to see, different levels of biological complexity are mixedinto culture to varying degrees, and, as we shall see in chapter 3, you can include ge-netics in cultural theory without succumbing to genetic determinism. Even somebirds that are genetically predisposed to sing the songs appropriate to their speciesvary the forms of their songs depending upon the melodic influences in the environ-ments they are subjected to when young. So, the same problematic assumptionsabout biology that move Michaels to reduce deep pluralism to a racial view of cul-ture may encourage him to adopt a disembodied, undertextured model of culture.

Take, for instance, his dismissal of “passing,” the serious gamesome members of cultural minority groups play when they pretend to be membersof the majority. Michaels asserts:

The very idea of passing — whether it takes the form of looking like you be-long to a different race or of acting like you belong to a different race — re-quires an understanding of race as something separate from the way youlook and the way you act. If race were really nothing but culture, that is, ifrace really were nothing but a distinctive array of beliefs and practices, then,of course there could be no passing, since to believe and practice what themembers of any race believed and practiced would, by definition make you amember of that race.26

“By definition,” racial passing is impossible unless you presup-pose race. Well, it depends on how many elements are folded into the term race and,particularly, how textured and layered your understanding of an “array of beliefs andpractices” is. So let’s transport passing to a venue away from the domain of race.Suppose you are a working-class boy who grew up in Hampden, Baltimore, a neigh-borhood adjacent to Johns Hopkins University and the one that provided the inspi-ration for the John Waters film Pecker (as well as Waters’s Hairspray and a couple ofothers). You have graduated from a commuter college with high grades in Englishand a couple of stimulating essays to your credit. You are admitted to the EnglishDepartment at Hopkins and given a free ride. Let the passing begin.

First, there are characteristic modes of pronunciation memorial-ized in the fine muscles of your jaw, mouth, lips, and tongue. This accent, you fear,will mark you from the start to faculty and graduate students you have observed eat-ing lunch in Hampden. You have seen how they sometimes raise their eyebrows andsmirk discreetly while listening attentively to waiters with your accent. So, by paying


close attention to the accents of the talking heads on TV, you make a concerted effortto mimic pronunciations that fit seamlessly into the world of the graduate seminar.Of course, you slip up sometimes. That is why you remain as quiet as feasible duringthe first year. Maybe that initial reserve will stand you in good stead later.

Second, characteristic neighborhood expressions have becomepart of your second nature, even though it would be an exaggeration to reduce themto a unique set of concepts and beliefs. Nonetheless, they draw your attention toparticular features of the world and turn it away from other possibilities. You nowwork to put some of these expressions on hold, even as you also hold them in reservefor possible use at a later date.

Third, there are distinctive memory traces from your childhood,some of which filtered into your mode of being before you developed sophisticatedlanguage skills, for the materiality of culture exceeds the concepts and beliefs thatenter into it. They include, for starters, actual hitting, caressing, cuddling, hugging,cooing, bumping, odors, and confinement mixed into conceptually mediated practicesof love, anger, discipline, education, and rivalry. Indeed, sometimes a verbal expres-sion of care can be confounded persistently by blows, gestures, and looks that are atodds with it. The effect of such mixtures on your visceral habits of perception, de-sire, trust, faith, judgment, and inflection of arguments in adult life is likely to beabout as strong as the influence of your childhood gait on your adult style of walk-ing. That is, the effect is real without being wholly determinative. This complexmixing of touch, image, smell, sound, posture, concept, affect, and belief in actualconduct is easily forgotten by those whose habits correspond fairly closely to theseminar norm. But its efficacy may become vivid to a bright kid from Hampdenworking hard to pass as the graduate student he is now defined to be.

Fourth, there are the experiences of dissonance between the aca-demic presentations of culture and class-geographic experiences now embodied inthe somatic markers through which your perceptions are marshaled and your iden-tity is crystallized. Such corporeal markers, on my reading, embody a linguistic di-mension without conforming to the sophisticated network of contrasts available onthe most sophisticated layer of human reflection. That is, there is an interplay be-tween the intersubjective world of linguistic distinctions and the corporeal register.These less refined intensities, moreover, are communicated to the higher, more re-fined regions, helping to nudge the porous processes of argument in some directionsrather than others.27 They might find expression, for instance, in an impulse tolaughter surging up after a literary figure you admire has been convicted of five

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performative contradictions. You might then draw on your street wisdom to identifyroutes by which to slip through the porous net of these arguments or to convert itsapparent defeat into a positive experience.

These are a few of the issues to engage when a working-class kidpasses as a graduate student in an elite university — a fair amount of passing withoutthe invocation of race. Still, a brash working-class kid might find pure passing to behumiliating. He might, therefore, occasionally express some corporeally ingrainedingredients of his cultural heritage with brazen humor while working out creativeconnections to the new world in which he now participates. Pecker does walk homeon weekends, after all. Or he may alternate between passing and expressing pieces ofhis background, deploying a combination of silences, jokes, mimicking, and pretenseto get through the first year. Gradually he may inject more stutters, guffaws, jokes,and objections into the seminars. These may coalesce eventually to form a distinc-tive sensibility. That sensibility, in turn, may play an important role in the relativeweights he gives to particular arguments, his pleasure in paradox, and the apprecia-tion of the layering of culture he brings to his studies. For he is now even more lay-ered than before. If he is lucky, some of the dissonances, remainders, surpluses, andresistances between his present and his past will elevate his teaching, impart creativ-ity to his literary work, and energize his love life.

You could extend and proliferate such examples without presup-posing a biological concept of race if you develop an embodied, layered conceptionof perception and culture: gays passing as straight in a small town or a military unit;straights passing as gay; atheists passing as devout Christians as they run for office;professors passing as hip participants in popular culture; homeless women passing ascustomers when they need to use a restaurant bathroom. In all these instances theaffective layering of identity and culture allows various mixtures of expression, loy-alty, disloyalty, passing, resistance, and invention.

Michaels pulls off the dismissal of passing and the reduction ofculture it implies by converting each example of the layered materialization of cul-ture into an instance of its racialization. He sustains that formula, in turn, by tacitlyequating the biological with the genetic and the genetic with the fixed. Sometimeshe gets it right. And he does point to risks accompanying any effort to support anethos of deep, layered pluralism. But he does not show the negotiation of such a po-litical culture to be impossible. For there is a hell of a lot more to the biological ele-ment of thinking, culture, and identity than the dubious genetics of race. The colorof perception, the layered texture of culture, and the fugitive energies of becoming

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are flattened out by such an austere picture of life. Once you restore mobility, color,texture, energy, and ambivalence to culture, life in Pleasantville starts to sing again.But you now lose the ability to say the following and make it stick: “Cultural plural-ism is an oxymoron; its commitment to culture is contradicted by its commitment topluralism.”28

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T H R E E

Nature/Culture Imbrications

every conception of culture, identity, ethics, or thinking contains an image ofnature. And the relation goes the other way too. Even the most adamant realist in,say, engineering presupposes a cultural conception of how scientific cognition pro-ceeds. To adopt the correspondence model of truth, for instance, is to act as if humancapacities for cognition can be brought into close correspondence with the way ofthe world separate from those capacities. Nietzsche would say that such a realism pre-serves the remains of an old theology.1 Its operational assumption, first, that theworld has a deep, complete structure and, second, that such a structure is available tothe cognition of human agents might appear improbable to a culture in which faith ina world created by a universal, omniscient God did not have a long run. Creationistsand realists may slide closer together in their assumptions and hubris than eithergroup today acknowledges.

Absent centuries-long belief in a world completely known to aGod, it might seem likely, as it did to some Greeks, that cognition has evolved in waysthat help us to intervene in the world rather than to hook onto it as it is in itself. Andmany contemporary scientists now accept something close to the more modest view.

In this chapter I explore an idea of thinking and culture set in nei-ther a theo-teleological view of nature nor a classical scientific model. I continue this

Nature, Affect, Thinking . . .

effort through reference to new work in neurocience in the next chapter. The orien-tation in question, although popular in other times and places, has not gained muchpopularity in modern Western life. Nietzsche pursued it, but his thought has oftenbeen considered to suffer from a poetic conception of nature put to rest by modernscience. Given the recent work by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers in chemistryand the philosophy of science, respectively, however, now may be a particularly apttime to reopen this issue.

The enterprise we are pursuing has a paradoxical twist to it. Everycultural interpretation expresses an idea of nature; but because the partisans of eachare themselves part of nature and culture, they lack a position above the field fromwhich to reach definitive judgments about it. Unless they adopt a transcendentalstrategy, like Kant, who contended that we must act as if nature can be comprehendedonly through an authoritative model of lawful regularity. But so far every attempt toestablish such a transcendental perspective with ironclad authority has bumped intothe paradox just identified. I affirm the paradox of interpretation as a condition ofpossibility for this work, affirming that the perspective defended here will, even if itmarshals considerable resources in its support, fall short of establishing its own ne-cessity. It will be contestable, meaning that it is possible for others to support otherreadings of the nature/culture relation, as they too work to defend the comparativeplausibility of their accounts. I agree with Augustine, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaardthat thinking itself becomes blunt and dull if it always tries to resolve paradoxesrather than to open up spaces within them and negotiate considered responses tothem.

Nature and Unpredictability

Nietzsche’s views of science and nature are familiar enough. He defends modern sci-ence against a history of attacks by the Catholic Church. He then criticizes earlymodern science for its insistence that the world is governed by eternal laws discernibleto science properly organized. And he finally endorses another model of materialismas a reflective “supposition” or “conjecture.” He thinks that the modern regulativeidea of a world governed by invariant laws has been useful to human welfare andself-preservation; he even believes he can identify something in the evolutionary de-velopment of the human animal that has encouraged adoption of a lawlike model.But he thinks it is also possible and laudable to attenuate those same tendencies,without eliminating them. Here is a statement about the evolution of the humantendency to treat similarities as if they were equalities:

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N a t u r e , A f f e c t , T h i n k i n g . . .

Innumerable beings who made inferences in a way different from ours per-ished. . . . Those, for example, who did not know how to find often enoughwhat is “equal” as regards both nourishment and hostile animals — those, inother words, who subsumed things too slowly and cautiously — were favoredwith a less probability of survival than those who guessed upon encounteringsomething similar that they must be equal. The dominant tendency, however,to treat as equal what is merely similar — an illogical tendency, for nothing isreally equal — is what first created any basis for logic.2

These traditions of equalization enter into habits, organic func-tions, institutional regimes, and the experimental designs of science. They becomecorporeally encoded into patterns of perception and cultural vocabulary. But theyare never completely stabilized. The similarities-rendered-equal and the differences-rendered-similar periodically manifest themselves as rebel forces within habits, lin-guistic ambiguity, organic functions, and so on. These differential energies and ener-getic disturbances both enable creativity in thinking and help to propel interventionsfor reform of the “laws” of science. We have a limited but real capacity to encounter,but not of course to know, some dimensions of the world that escape, exceed, resistand destabilize the best equalizations of nature we have so far enacted and enforced.

The lawlike model of science, however, resists this double-entryorientation by projecting a regulative ideal of nature as completely ordered. It re-places, in Nietzsche’s judgment, one kind of ontological narcissism with another.The theo-telological image of the world promised the possibility of eternal salvationby sowing the seeds of an accusatory culture in this life. It ran that risk as it appraiseddiverse constituencies according to the objective norms it purported to find in na-ture. The newer, lawlike model promises that we can see our reason reflected in na-ture and, to a considerable extent, harness nature for the purposes of happiness,preservation, and longevity. If nature can’t be for us in the first sense, it must be forus in the second. That is the message of the second image as Nietzsche receives andresists it.

What is the Nietzschean underworld — the world circulating inand around discernible regularities? It can only be characterized cryptically. But ifyou adjust each element in nature to the speed appropriate to it — a very short timefor a neuron firing in the human brain, a longer one for the movement of humanconsciousness, longer yet for the life span of a human, much more so for the span ofbiological evolution, and the longest yet for evolution of the universe — you may en-gage an unpredictable element of “becoming” in each pattern of duration. “The

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world with which we are concerned [the world of appearance] is false, i.e., is not afact but a fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is‘in flux’, as something in a state of becoming.”3 Note that after saying this world isfalse, meaning that it does not exhaust the way of the world, Nietzsche also says thatit is an “approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations.” He thinks, in-deed, that such accumulations often both approximate reality and play an indispens-able role in cultural life. It is just that they often also deserve to be brought into con-tact with fugitive forces that exeed them. Here is a formulation by Zarathustra thatventures a claim about the world of becoming while seeming to confess how evenZarathustra is unable to pursue this intimation consistently:

When the water is spanned by planks, when bridges and railings leap overthe river, verily those are believed who say, “everything is in flux. . . .” Butwhen the winter comes . . . , then verily, not only the blockheads say, “Doesnot everything stand still?”

“At bottom everything stands still.” — that is truly a winter doctrine. . . .O my brothers is everything not in flux now? Have not all railings andbridges fallen into the water? Who could still cling to “good” and “evil”? . . .The thawing wind blows — thus preach in every street, my brothers.4

The winter doctrine, “At bottom everything stands still.” Thatwould mean that the laws of nature are complete and fixed. There is neither excessover them nor asymmetry in them from which long-term changes might be mobi-lized. It would mean that the experience of history and the arrow of time are illusorywhen it comes to nature. Does such a presumption throw the evolution of the universeinto doubt? What about biological evolution? It depends on whether it is possible todevise laws that explain how the exact course the evolutionary processes actually havetaken is the only course they could have taken. No one has done that yet, to my knowl-edge. But many think it can be done in principle. If that project were to succeed, itwould show how both modes of evolution would follow exactly the same course ifthey started again tomorrow. Until that happens, the regulative ideal of nature standsas a conjecture. Nietzsche contests that conjecture, with an alternative regulative ideal,even as he also resists and challenges creationism.

“O my brothers is everything not in flux now?” That doesn’t meanthat the world is devoid of proximate and approximate regularities. It does mean thateven if we were to bring the most refined laws we are capable of formulating to ourobservation of the initial conditions from which the universe and biology on earthactually evolved, we would not be able to predict the exact future course of either.

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Put that way, the formulation hovers in a zone of indiscernibility between a claimabout (1) the course of nature separate from our perception of it and (2) our highestability to chart the course of nature given the ill fit between our capacities and theway of a world not necessarily designed to correspond to them. Zarathustra’s per-spective is both paradoxical and contestable. He can provide pointers to a fundamen-tal mobility of things that may exceed our talent for fitting them into a scheme ofcalculation, but he cannot now prove the truth of his conjecture. Neither, he thinks,can his opponents do so with respect to their regulative ideals of nature and scien-tific explanation.

Why entertain his perspective, then? Because of the ethico-political stakes of doing so: the Nietzschean perspective — in conjunction with effortsto overcome existential resentment of a world with these characteristics — invites usto become more responsive to natural/cultural processes by which brand-new things,beings, identities, and cultural movements surge into being. It encourages us to de-velop more nuanced balances between the comforts and agonies of being on oneside and the forces of becoming on the other.

The Nietzschean portrait of nature is often thought to reflect afaulty image of science. The fact that Nietzsche links the scientific problematic to anasceticism previously attributed only to devotees of religious fideism has not endearedhim to philosophers of science either.5 His scattered reflections on nature, then,would be consigned to a dustbin in the history of science if it were not for recent re-flections on the character of science by Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel Prize winner in chem-istry and an inventor of complexity theory.

Prigogine and his collaborator, Isabelle Stengers, work with phys-ical systems that are “unstable” or “far from equilibrium.” Not all systems are in dis-equilibrium. A system in equilibrium is such that its dynamics are more or less main-tained despite environmental changes. A human population is in equilibrium if itremains stable throughout fluctuations in the rates at which people have sex, gatherfood, encounter disease-producing microorganisms, and so on. However, at far-from-equilibrium states, which abound in the world,6 molecules begin to act as “singular-ities,” the exact behavior of which cannot be predicted. They start to move in exquisiteresponse to each other and to tiny alterations in their parameters.

Unlike their behavior in equilibrium systems, those in “dissipa-tive structures” are marked by an element of internal unpredictability, by capacitiesof self-development, by periods of significant openness to outside forces, and by atrajectory of irreversible change that endows them with a historical dimension. ThePrigoginian update of Epicurean physics and Nietzschean cosmology engages a nature

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that is sometimes creative and novelty producing, “where the possible is richer thanthe real,”7 and where, therefore, new structures come into being over time.

Even though such systems retain a persistent power to surpriseand the evolutionary ability to create what has never before existed, they also displaya kind of intelligibility retrospectively. This is where Prigogine expresses appre-ciation for the “approximations” Nietzsche notes. “What is now emerging,” writesPrigogine, “is an ‘intermediate’ description that lies somewhere between the twoalienating images of a deterministic world and an arbitrary world of pure chance.Physical laws lead to a new form of intelligibility as expressed by irreducible proba-bilistic representations.”8 A far-from-equilibrium system is neither the reversible sys-tem of classical dynamics nor a condition of constant flux unrecognizable as a system.Some read Nietzsche’s “flux” the latter way. My Nietzsche, the philosopher of torsionbetween being and becoming, is closer to Prigogine’s contention that “a new formu-lation of the laws of nature is now possible . . . , a more acceptable description in whichthere is room for both the laws of nature and novelty and creativity.”9

The integrable world of classical physics has two defining char-acteristics: its trajectories are reversible and they are determinist. The trajectoriesare reversible, or indifferent to time, because any possible evolution within the sys-tem is defined as equivalent to any other — each is a particular expression of the uni-versal laws of dynamics. And the sequence of equivalents can be reversed withoutchanging the outcome. Kant translates this picture of nature as it is itself into a nec-essary, lawlike pattern we must attribute to it. He speaks of Galileo, Copernicus, andTorricelli:

They learned that reason only perceives that which it produces after its owndesign; that it must not be content to follow, as it were, in the leading stringsof nature, but must proceed in advance with principles of judgment accord-ing to unvarying laws and compel nature to reply to its questions. . . . Reasonmust approach nature with the view of . . . a judge, who compels the witnessesto reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose.10

Prigogine seeks to modify the regulative ideal of reversible regu-larity. Prigogine’s is a world neither of Newtonian mechanism nor of teleological fi-nalism. When you consider each system in the time frame appropriate to it (a shorterspan for hurricanes and a much longer one for evolution of the universe), you cometo terms with the element of “becoming” in the world. Here’s how Prigogine makesthe point: “Matter near equilibrium behaves in a ‘repetitive’ way. On the other hand, . . .far from equilibrium we may witness the appearance of . . . a mechanism of ‘commu-

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nication’ among molecules.”11 Within this mechanism successive repetitions are notidentical to each other because they arise out of highly sensitized responses to “ini-tial conditions” that exceed the reach of our capacities for close delineation.

Bifurcation points, as forks that express the play of unpredictabil-ity and set new possibilities into motion, can also morph into a new state of order.Unstable systems set conditions of possibility, then, for emergent orders. Take theemergence of a termite mound, initiated in an unpredictable way but organized asan effect of stochastic or dicey behavior. You can think of the spots at which a ter-mite drops lumps of earth as underdetermined or “random.” But

in doing so they impregnate the lumps with a hormone that attracts othertermites. . . . the initial “fluctuation” would be the slightly larger concentrationof lumps . . . , which inevitably occurs at one time or another at some point inthe area. The amplification of this event is produced by the increased densityof termites in the region, attracted by the . . . hormone.12

Practitioners of classical dynamics often acknowledge the artifi-ciality of the nature they examine in the laboratory. But a world of reversibility re-mains a regulative ideal for them.13 When singularities or anomalies are observed,they are interpreted as a technical function of the observation process, or of limita-tions of human knowledge to date, not as signs of a world whose subtle powers ofmultiple causality may exceed our best approximations of it.

But Prigogine and Stengers question the value of this regulativeideal. Stengers writes:

The deterministic and reversible trajectory that we can calculate for simplesystems . . . would require, for unstable systems, a mode of knowledge thatwould only make sense for [a God] . . . who knew the positions and speeds ofthe entities in interaction with an infinite precision (an infinite number ofdecimals). That being the case, is it relevant to extend to unstable dynamicsystems the ideal of knowledge represented by a deterministic and reversibletrajectory? Should we judge as a simple approximation the probability treat-ment that we have to apply to unstable dynamic systems, that is, judge it inthe name of a knowledge that for intrinsic and noncontingent reasons wewill never have?14

Here Stengers articulates a conception of causality in unstable systems with affinitiesto Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, too, doubts that efficient “cause and effect,” as inter-preted by nineteenth-century models of science, predominates in nature:

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In truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a coupleof pieces, just as we perceive motion only at isolated points. . . . The sudden-ness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually it is only suddenfor us. In this moment of suddenness there is an infinite number of processesthat elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum anda flux and not, as we do, in terms of arbitrary division and dismemberment,would repudiate the concept of cause and effect.15

“An infinite number of processes that elude us” — this phrase iswonderfully indeterminate between (1) asserting that such processes themselves ex-ceed any possible computational logic and (2) asserting that the logic they may em-body either exceeds the coarse capacities of the human animal for close detection andconceptualization or is essentially affected by human interventions into it. Nietzscheadverts to a hypothetical god to highlight this zone of uncertainty between processesundesigned by a god and limits built into the capacities of human beings who havethemselves been jerry-rigged through a long, complex process of evolution.

What do Prigogine and Stengers say at this strategic juncture?In one formulation they assert that the image of a calculable “trajectory is not an ad-equate physical concept” for systems in disequilibrium.16 That formula leaves poisedin uncertainty whether the element of unpredictability flows from the world itself,from powers of observation and calculation, or from dissonant conjunctions betweenus and the world. Prigogine sometimes projects beyond this zone of uncertainty byspeaking of “objective unpredictability,” but Stengers increasingly focuses on the re-lational issue. She conceives science neither as an outsider’s discovery of nature noras a set of processes to which we must bring eternal categories unsusceptible tomodification, but as a shifting and dissonant “dialogue” between human assemblagesand nonhuman assemblages.

At both the macroscopic and microscopic levels, the sciences of nature arethus liberated from a narrow conception of objective reality, which believesit must in principle deny novelty and diversity in the name of an unchanginguniversal law. . . . They are from now on open to unpredictability. . . thus theyare open to a dialogue with a nature that cannot be dominated by a theoret-ical gaze, but must be explored, with an open world to which we belong, inwhose construction we participate.17

Modifying Stengers slightly, it seems reasonable to focus on the dialogical characterof science while projecting the element of unpredictability now accompanying thatdialogue into the future as a contestable expectation.


It is fair to say that a majority of scientists and philosophers ofscience today accept a different projection. They adopt the regulative ideal thatNietzsche, Prigogine, Stengers, and I resist. Some treat this as contestable territory,but many do not. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont are two red-blooded physicists whoobject to the perspective of Prigogine and Stengers in the strongest terms. Thesespeculators, they say, “give the educated public a distorted view of the topics theytreat” — although “their abuses do not even come close” to those of literary “post-modernists” who distort science for partisan political purposes.18 The two physiciststhus elevate themselves above political partisanship when it comes to the nature ofscience, even though Sokal perpetrated a famous hoax to expose the shallowness ofcritical engagements with it. But in calling the views of the Nobel laureate “abuses,”Sokal and Bricmont betray the detachment they project. They do not seem to con-sider a Kantian version of their position. Rather, they act as if the image of science asa mirror of predictable regularities has been definitively established when in fact itremains a contestable regulative ideal. The territory of legitimate contestability, forthem, stops at the point where the image of science as science begins, even thoughwhat counts as the definitive image has undergone numerous permutations over thepast two thousand years.

But what turns on these debates for cultural theorists? Well, whencultural theorists accept the lawlike model as authoritative for all nonhuman sys-tems, they feel pressed either to adopt a reductive model of social explanation or toproject a transcendental field that insulates human thinking, reason, and freedomfrom those lawful regularities. This is the pressure that drives cultural theorists towardKant, who sought both to accept Newtonian mechanics and to protect human free-dom and morality from it.

Here is a question that helped to propel Kantianism into beingin the Newtonian age: Where is the thinking of the scientist to be located in a worldof reversible laws? In nature? Or above it? If in nature, the image of thought cutsagainst the possibility of independent powers of human thought in a Newtonianworld. If above it, the theory demands Kantian transcendental deductions to secureitself. But Kant’s deductions over time have shown themselves to be less necessaryand more contestable than he imagined. Moreover, as I shall argue in the last chap-ter, Kant’s regulative ideal of reason itself limits creativity in thinking and judgmentmore severely than advisable. Today, perhaps, many cultural theorists could profitfrom a layered image of thinking that is not located above biology, or shaped by areductionist reading of biocultural relations, or governed by a theo-teleological pro-jection into nature. The orientation that emerges will surely be contestable. It is

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unlikely to defeat its competitors definitively. But it may project another crediblecandidate onto the field of debate among Kantian, reductionist, and teleologicalmodels of human embodiment.

A Zone of Indiscernibility

There are several domains in which a Nietzsche/Prigogine conception of naturecould be elaborated and tested. Prigogine applies it to the evolution of the universe,suggesting that in the “preuniverse” matter was not yet organized as a material com-posite. Instead, nonmaterialized forces generated “an irreversible process transform-ing gravitation into matter.”19 Matter for him is itself an effect of “becoming,” then,to use Nietzsche’s locution. It was consolidated out of an irreversible bifurcation. Ifthis is so, “time precedes existence.” That is, time precedes the determinate consol-idation of matter in the evolution of the universe. Prigogine, then, reinstates withinnature a temporality and historicity that modern science had tried to overturn. In adebate with Henri Bergson, for instance, Albert Einstein insisted that the appear-ance of time in life was an illusion that physics could correct. Later, after a closefriend died, he wrote to the friend’s wife, saying, “Michele has left this strange worlda little ahead of me. This is of no importance. For us convinced physicists, the distinc-tion between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”20

A related forum of exploration is the classical theory of biologi-cal evolution. Henri Bergson and Stephen J. Gould have already modified the Dar-winian reading in ways that resonate with the Prigogine perspective.21 The coursethat biological evolution actually has taken, they say, does not conform to the courseit might take if it were to be launched again from the same volatile initial conditions.Bergson focuses on how self-regulating biological systems generate, through a seriesof interactions between virtual capacities and the external forces to which the systemis open, “forks” ushering new forms of life into being. These forks could not havebeen predicted by human beings — had the relevant scientists and sophisticated re-search technologies been there — with access to the “initial conditions” from whichthey sprang. Such emergent forms structure surprise, creation, and the new into theevolutionary process. They do so in ways that make evolution irreducible to a mech-anistic, creationist, or teleological model. The theory, however, does give creation-ism a presence of sorts within, rather than prior to, the quirky process of evolution.Consistent with these leads, Keith Ansell Pearson summarizes an innovative theoryof the role of genetics in evolution, a perspective that has attracted a significant mi-nority of biologists. After exploring the “curiously awkward history” symbiosis hashad in biology, Pearson says:

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The importance of symbiotic bacteria in the “origin of species” — repeatedbacterial symbioses result in the emergence of new genes — is now widelyappreciated. . . . The detailed organization of the organelles in eukaryoticcells . . . show[s] that crucial evolutionary processes were not the result ofslow accumulation of random changes (mutations) in the genes of ances-tral . . . cells. Rather, it seems highly probable that they were the result of in-tracellular symbiosis in which some cells incorporated into their own cell con-tents partner cells of another kind that had different metabolic abilities.22

Again, these views contain considerable extrapolation and specu-lation. But so do the alternative perspectives each is ranged against. Speculation isunavoidable in these domains today. And each speculative theory, in turn, helps toset a specific agenda for cultural and political thought. While the perspective sum-marized above pushes against the limit of my knowledge of physics and biology, italso resonates with experiences of perception, thinking, culture, and action thatmake independent claims upon contemporary attention. Nature is always mixed intoculture on the image projected here. And culture can be thought of as part of naturein the largest sense of nature as the encompassing whole in which we are set. So ifthe accentuated velocity of contemporary life, reflected in the pace of trade, merg-ers, production processes, cinema, TV, air travel, population migrations, diseasetransmission, climatic change, and so on, heightens the experience of unpredictabil-ity, temporality, and creativity in thinking and politics, reflection into those experi-ences may offer subsidiary support for the Prigogine/Nietzsche conception of na-ture too.

It is probably clear already that, within this orientation, classicaldistinctions of kind between culture and nature now become translated into interact-ing layers of biocultural complexity. For it is not only in human culture that perception,interpretation, unpredictability, and history occur. They occur, to varying degrees ofcomplexity and on different scales of duration, in several nonhuman processes aswell. Moreover, fairly sophisticated powers of discrimination and communicationcut across the classical nature/culture divide. A chimpanzee has more powers of dis-crimination and communication than a young child, and some types of birds are betterequipped to incorporate the songs of other species into their own repertoires whenthey are young than many human adults are to modify ingrained habits of drinkingand smoking.23

Perhaps sociobiology reduces culture to regularity because it re-mains governed by dull readings of nature and biology. To “mix” culture with na-ture, in this model, is to overwhelm the former with the reductive determinism of

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the latter. And perhaps disembodied theories of cultural intersubjectivity are pulled tothe opposite pole because of the same assumptions. If sociobiologists enclose human-ity within a crude concept of nature, many intersubjectivists eschew reference to “firstnature” because they too tacitly accept a flat, determinist model of it. That is whythey often lift language, thinking, identity, choice, and ethics out of it. They implic-itly elevate these capacities above biology to preserve freedom and dignity, as theyare allowed to conceive them. But to accomplish that task they depreciate the vari-able degrees of agency and linguistic capacity in nonhuman animals and, at the sametime, underplay the layered, biocultural character of human perception, thinking,culture, identity, and ethics. The implications for ecology are not pretty.

The deprecation of nonhuman animals is sometimes accomplishedthrough the implicit adoption of an accordion model of language. Language is con-strued in open, expansive terms when considered as a human capacity; it includeswithin its orbit multiple media of expression and most capacities to draw distinctions,express inner states, make discriminations, and modify discriminations already made.But crocodiles and monkeys might participate in some aspects of language on thisreading. Even bacteria come close. So the idea of language is squeezed back into anarrow range when it comes to the assessment of whether nonhuman assemblagesembody linguistic and cultural capacities. Although human culture is in fact composedof essentially embodied beings implicated in complex patterns of action, and althoughsome brain nodules in the human brain network are shared with other animals, cul-tural theorists haunted by determinist images of nature are pressed to dismiss, ignore,or degrade the corporeal layering of language, perception, and thinking in humanlife. We encountered one example of such a machine in motion in chapter 2.

A multilayered conception of culture and thinking is needed to-day, one that comes to terms with how biology is mixed differentially into everylayer of human culture, even as it addresses the highest modes of intellectuality,artistry, creativity, freedom, and reflexivity of which the human animal is capable.To pursue this end it may be prudent to put scare quotes around the terms “nature”and “culture” on occasion. That pair, in its classically defined form, now impedescreative thinking into the biolayered composition of human thought, action, and in-tersubjectivity, for human thought carries creative possibilities partly because thatwhich moves below it and feeds into it also moves across a horizon that is not entirelyclosed. If you subtract the elements of time and creativity from your picture of na-ture, all the boasting in the world about the creativity of thought will ring hollow.Many governed by a fixed model of nature are tempted both to contract all creativ-

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ity into thinking alone and to withdraw to a transcendental model of thinking that isill suited to the creativity they seek to support.

“Nature” and “culture,” on my reading, are not defined by cate-gorical differences between the material and the immaterial, or between that whichis highly predictable and that which is unpredictable, or between that which is sim-ple and that which is complex, or between that which lacks a history and that whichis carried in history, or between that which is governed by logic and that which isnot, or between that which lacks a capacity for discrimination and that which ex-presses such a capacity. It is not even sufficient to say that culture consists of a “sym-bolic realm” whereas the forces of nature lack symbolism, although the reconfigura-tion of such a distinction comes closest to filling the bill.

Symbolic activity, judgment, and reflexive consciousness requirecomplex, biological brain systems in which they are set. But the brain network mustboth engage the linguistically mediated world and respond to multiple signals fromthe body that bear the traces of past experiences upon them. Again, the human brainsystem receives and translates innumerable proprioceptive signals as an individualacts in the world, and it depends upon a variety of external media, supports, andtechniques to coordinate thought and action. These latter media themselves alsomodify the microorganization of the body/brain system, as when the energy outputin the brains of children with dyslexia is reduced after they are taught to read withnew techniques.24 Human thinking in general involves complex culture/body/brainnetworks, and each level in this layered, tripartite assemblage is marked by specificcapacities of speed, reception, and enactment.

We still don’t know enough about what a variety of animals canand cannot do, let alone what the human body can do. And we may never know every-thing. At strategic intervals new capacities previously unexpected might emerge,along with pronounced shifts in the cultural environment, as when the invention ofart and writing enabled humans to record stories and moral codes susceptible to fu-ture reference, invocation, challenge, and modification. Natural beings become cul-tural as they acquire capacities of linguistic sophistication, reflexive violence, ethicalreflexivity, and artistic achievement.

As biocultural mixtures move toward a middle range of com-plexity, the difference between “nature” and “culture,” as classically represented,glides into a zone of indiscernibility. For if there is an element of artifice in natureand of perdurance in culture, the classical line between them becomes blurred fromtwo sides. This is the zone that deserves much more attention today in cultural

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theory, the zone that might provide a more energetic focus as intersubjectivists andsociobiologists back away from the dull notion of natural regularity that encouragesthe first group to bracket culture from nature and the second to reduce culture tonatural regularity. It is a zone of indiscernibility because within this zone we are stillunclear exactly how the mixing occurs, how complex each layer of capacity is, andhow much room there is for mobility and creativity once a set of initial capacitiesand dispositions has become organized. Even as these questions become more clearlydefined, it may still remain a zone of indiscernibility in one sense, because the mix-tures may authorize a new set of conceptions that fit into neither the most complexlevels of nature then definable nor the simplest modes of culture. Merleau-Pontysuggests how wide and layered this zone may be when he says,

It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behavior which onechooses to call “natural” followed by a manufactured layer . . . in the sensethat there is not a word, not a form of behavior that does not owe somethingto purely biological being — and which does not at the same time elude thesimplicity of animal life, and cause forms of vital behavior to deviate fromtheir pre-ordained direction, through a certain sort of leakage and genius forambiguity which might serve to define man.25

Explorations of this zone of indiscernibility show the most promiseof superseding the options between intellectualism and determinism debated by manyintersubjectivists, rationalists, behavioralists, and sociobiologists. Let’s think, then,more about thinking.

Affect, Thinking, Language

Nietzsche, already leaping over the early-modern constitution of the nature/culturedyad, thought things about the layered and creative character of thinking that pull it past the mechanical determinism of reductionists, the transcendence of a two-world metaphysic, and the theo-teleological model advanced by those who will foldnature into culture only if the former is invested with a divine purpose. Thinking forNietzsche involves a complex process of discord and coordination among multipletheaters of activity. As he puts it, “The chamber of consciousness is small,” too smallto perform the complex task of thinking alone. That is why, he thinks, intellectualistsso ironically underestimate the creative power and complexity of thinking. “Consciousthinking, especially that of the philosopher, is the least vigorous and therefore alsothe relatively mildest and calmest form of thinking; and thus precisely philosophersare most apt to be led astray about the nature of knowledge.”26 “Philosophers” tend


to give too much self-sufficiency to consciousness and to limit thinking too much tothe discovery of knowledge. They therefore tend to confine themselves to that partof thinking in which logic plays its most active role. But consciousness is itself pre-organized and moved to some extent by modes of thinking below its reach. Withoutthose processes consciousness would be flat; with them, it is less self-regulating orself-sufficient than intellectualists imagine. And it also may be better equipped bothto receive disciplines and techniques applied to rapid processes below conscious reg-ulation and to bring new ideas, concepts, and aspirations into the world. I do not, ofcourse, deny that there are dangers attached to this feature of the human condition.I suggest, rather, that the least viable strategy for liberals, democrats, pluralists, andcosmopolites to adopt is to allow a real concern for the dangers to keep our eyeswide shut with respect to the positive possibilities, for nationalists and dogmatists ofother sorts already actively engage this register of being. Perhaps the most danger-ous presumption to adopt is that there could be a vacuum in this domain.

On the “lower” layers of being there is a massive filtering orsubtraction of sensory material, even though some of the filtered material entersinto side perceptions that might become available later for reflection. Then thereare, as I will call them, proto-thoughts that, as quick as greased lightning, processthe already reduced perceptions further so that consciousness will be able to workupon them. This part of thinking, while it forms distinctions and resemblances thatmight be called linguistic in a large sense of that term, is too crude and fast to beavailable to direct conscious inspection or revision. Nietzsche writes:

We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we commu-nicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicatethemselves if they wanted to: they lack words. . . . Speech, it seems, was de-vised only for the average, medium, communicable.27

Nietzsche includes within thinking itself the lightning-quickprocess of filtering alluded to above. In doing so, he ennobles its significance andreach. Part of the reason he can do so is that he has already translated the global dis-tinction between nature and culture into multiple layers of biocultural being. Somepresentations of Nietzsche misrepresent his account of thinking as “idealistic” be-cause they leave this prior transfiguration of the nature/culture pair out of the picture.

To thematize the intralayered character of thinking is to discernhow thought embodies powerful pressures to assimilate new things to old habits ofperception and linguistic “equalization.” These capacities and tendencies are crucial tothought. But countervailing pressures and possibilities are also at work in the layered

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corporeality of cultural beings. Thinking bounces in magical bumps and chargesacross zones marked by differences of speed, capacity, and intensity. It is above all inthe dicey relations between the zones that the seeds of creativity are planted. Forthinking, again, is not harnessed entirely by the tasks of representation and knowl-edge.28 Through its layered intra- and intercorporeality new ideas, theories, and iden-tities are sometimes propelled into being. These new ideas, concepts, sensibilities,and identities later become objects of knowledge and representation. Thinking is thuscreative as well representative, and its creativity is aided by the fact that the processof thinking is not entirely controlled by the agents of thought. If thinking is part ofnature, as the largest whole in which we are encompassed, then the experience ofcreativity in thinking provides a piece of testimony in support of the idea that otheraspects of nature may have variable capacities for creative production as well. HenceNietzsche’s resistance to the lawlike model of evolution in favor of a conception ofevolution as becoming — and Prigogine’s too.

If you cling to a classical model of nature, it might seem that thecreative element in thinking could be preserved only through the elevation of themost refined element of thought to a transcendental register. Hence Kant. But hisattempt to secure a refuge for thought while also supporting a Newtonian picture ofnature eventually overwhelms the creative element in thinking from another direc-tion. For the Kantian model issues in a set of transcendental arguments that resolvethe most fundamental issues about science, morality, and aesthetics in advance. It istrue that in Kant the sublime carries counter possibilities within it. And this is avaluable moment to work upon, even against Kant’s highest wishes. For he containsthose possibilities by claiming that the sense of dissonance inhabiting the sublimeindicates a more profound and inscrutable “reason” rising above it. Nietzsche, how-ever, both appreciates the idea that forces beyond representation might be indicatedwithout being knowable and resists the indications Kant projects. He breaks downtranscendental reason to leave open the possibility that thinking helps to bring newthings into the world not already allowed or disallowed by an authoritative tran-scendental field. For he dissents from every version of a two-world metaphysic.

William James captures as well as anyone the layered process ofthinking alluded to here. He says, “The highest and most elaborated mental prod-ucts are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the massoffered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still largeramount of yet simpler material, and so on.”29 But how does thought move acrossthese registers? It is here that Nietzsche’s resistance to both classical models of hu-man and natural science and transcendental philosophies of the subject may accom-

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plish its finest work. Consider a formulation summarizing points heretofore devel-oped while adding another element to the mix:

I maintain the phenomenality of the inner world, too: everything of whichwe become conscious is arranged, simplified, schematized, interpreted throughand through. . . . “Causality” eludes us; to suppose a direct causal link betweenthoughts, as logic does — that is the consequence of the crudest and clumsi-est observation. Between two thoughts all kinds of affects play their game;but their motions are too fast, therefore we fail to recognize them. . . . “Think-ing” as the epistemologists conceive it, simply does not occur: it is quite ar-bitrary fiction, arrived at by selecting one element from the process andeliminating all the rest.30

“Between two thoughts all kinds of affects play their game.” Af-fect is part of biology, if anything is, and Nietzsche folds it into the very mobility ofthinking. Without affect, thinking would lack creativity; with it, thinking is investedwith the volatility of nature. Nietzsche’s focus on the rapid play of affect in thinkingwas perhaps easier for many philosophers to ignore before the advent of film; theycould do so by “selecting one element from the process and eliminating all the rest.”Nietzsche does his best to make it difficult, though. His texts are organized to workupon our thinking by encouraging the movement of affect. Thus the numerous con-densed and sometimes outrageous formulations. Or the use of numbered nodules toencourage the reader to construct a series of mosaic connections for further explo-ration, rather than simply reading the text as a linear story. You might read the nod-ules in order the first time, and then select a subset from different parts of the textfor reading together a second time. More subtly, Nietzsche’s use of ellipses (. . .) atthe end of some sentences encourages you to break away from the text for a mo-ment. Doing so opens a new round of intrasubjective communication between yourvirtual register and a conscious line of reflection. After you have done such fugitivework for a while, you might return to the text to see where it picks up by compari-son to where your thinking has gone. It is above all in the encounter between whereyou have gone and where Nietasche is going that creative things break out. Nietzsche’suse of ellipses in his written texts is in fact remarkably close to the way some film di-rectors today use “irrational cuts” between scenes to encourage us to engage thenonlinear character of time, a technique to which we turn in chapters 4 and 6.

Today a dense series of loops and counterloops among cinema,TV, philosophy, neurophysiology, and everyday life enable people to explore the re-lation between thinking and affect more readily. Nietzsche’s insights about the con-

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nections between them are thus much harder to ignore. As film critic Steven Shavirosuggests, cinema, with its concentrated intersections of image, voice, sound, rhythms,and musical scores, often “affirms the powers of the body, and it sees the very opac-ity and insubordination of the flesh as a stimulus to thought and as its necessary con-dition.” The film close-up of a face in a romantic scene, for instance, may allow youto linger over subtle shifts in the pupils of the eyes, changes in looseness or tautnessof the lips, a variation in the pace at which the eyes are blinking, or a change in ex-pression that lasts just long enough to make a difference. The film close-up, in turn,gives you cues to read in other nonfilmic settings that move at a more rapid pace, al-lowing you to draw a set of side perceptions into sharper focus. And, of course, thesecues can also be translated into lessons on how to simulate moods and emotions,adding another layer of complexity to the endless game of expression, pretense, andinterpretation. In challenging “the academic tendency. . . to foreground significationat the expense of affect,” Shaviro joins Nietzsche in addressing the ubiquitous roleof affect inside perception, thinking, and judgment.31

Consider the closing scene of Five Easy Pieces, a film I saw for thesecond time in a theater in Canberra in 2000, thirty years after its American release.The closing scene begins after Karen Black, brilliantly playing Rayette, the warm,loving waitress coping with a chronically discontented boyfriend, has gone into atruck stop minimart to pick up snacks for a long drive south from northern Wash-ington State. Jack Nicholson, the man hopelessly divided between a musical, upper-middle-class heritage (as “Robert”) and a bare-bones working-class life (as “Bobby”),has given her his wallet to pay for the snacks. He has just walked out of the gas sta-tion toilet. As the scene opens, we see him talking to a truck driver without hearingwhat he says. Then he climbs into the cab of the truck. As Rayette returns to the caron the front left side of the wide shot, she looks around anxiously for her man. Thelogging truck crawls north on the deep right side of the frame, out of her line of vi-sion. The scene rolls for a few minutes as the credits are played. The absence of di-alogue, the sound of the truck’s gears grinding up for a long trek, the image of thelarge truck rolling slowly north toward working-class, macho territory as the car sitsin front of the gas pump pointed south, and the uncertainty of the waitress as shelooks every which way but north for Bobby — all coalesce to communicate a series ofconnections and divisions between the two lovers. The fact that we see things out-side both characters’ lines of vision suggests that we may be in a better position thanthey to ponder the contradictions of their relationship — but not finally to explain itsterms. For there is nothing in the scenes prior to this one that necessitated Bobby’s

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departure at that moment. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. It makes sense ret-rospectively, but lacks necessity prospectively.

An old film, pulled out of its spatiotemporal context of presenta-tion. In Canberra, the audience tarries until the credits are completed, and thenpeople file out slowly and quietly. As you walk out, a variety of thoughts might betriggered, depending in part upon the virtual memories each brings to this encounter.You might recall a star-crossed relationship whose intensity you have never revealedto the companion strolling out with you. Or, as if from nowhere, you might wishwith sudden intensity that your dad were alive again, realizing only hours later thathis loss was made vivid by the juxtaposition of the closing scene with the one pre-ceding it in which Robert leaves the home of his paralyzed father for the last time.Or you might wonder, in a flash, what Bobby is running toward in Alaska, preceded —as he is — by the female lovers he had earlier picked up as hitchhikers on their wayto a new life in the north. Or, again, you might wish that films of this sort did notplay so blatantly on emotions you would rather leave in the vault, allowing, finally,this thought to become the occasion for your first comment to your partner aboutthe film. For the others had flown by too fast for you to speak them. Then, immedi-ately after that comment, you might think how the superciliousness that often char-acterizes members of the upper middle class is also resisted or overcome by many ofthat class’s members (e.g., Robert’s sister and occasionally his brother). That thought,in turn, might bounce your mind to a specific colleague who believes the worldowes him everything because of his aristocratic pedigree. Or, again, you might recallmore vividly than you had for years the chords of Chopin, as your mother occasion-ally played them on a whim when you were young (and you may realize only muchlater — if ever — that this thought was triggered by a series of similarities betweenRayette and your working-class mother). And, a few seconds after that, you maythink how the film, in giving depth mostly to the Nicholson character, tracks themale-centered tendency of life during the early 1970s. You may now be moved tothink about the gender/class relations in which the film is set, whereas others startedwith that thought as they launched the slow trek up the theater aisle. You may, then,think any number of things in this affectively charged setting, or all of the above inrapid succession before you reach the theater door . . .

The closing scene of Five Easy Pieces could rapidly mobilize aseries of affectively imbued virtual memories and, above them, a set of explicit rec-ollections, even if you do not think it is that good a film. As you stroll slowly up theaisle, numerous thoughts arrive and depart with lightning speed, faster than they

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could be spoken. Their shape and texture are triggered by a series of encounters be-tween scenes in the film and affective memories they trigger in you. Some of thesememories work upon you without being translated into explicit recollections. Thoseare the virtual memories, some of which may surface as recollections later. Otherssally forth as explicit recollections, setting off specific trains of thought, even if theytoo are determined in shape and intensity not by the past alone but by this tempo-rally specific conjunction between the present and regions of the past it calls up.Both tracks recapitulate the way the film presents the past of Bobby/Robert, for itconveys the role of the past in his present through bits and pieces as the story pro-ceeds. A chronology is superseded by selective segments of past ordered nonchrono-logically in relation to present experiences. The way you and Bobby meticulouslyreview the furnishings of the affluent household of his father when he enters thehouse after an absence of a few years provides one such occasion. The scene revealshow Bobby’s pattern of virtual memory and explicit recollection has already begunto filter into yours, even though you may also retain some critical distance from it. Itlends support to Bergson’s theory of the layering of memory. As the film unfolds,you piece together the past, not as it is in itself, but as it is filtered through Bobby’sexperience of the present, giving texture to his character as you do so. By the finalscene you are not called upon to recall Bobby’s past. You ponder conflicts, cruelties,and blind spots in his character, as your appreciation of its formation over time hasnow congealed.

Maybe as you daydream the next afternoon, several of thesethoughts will surge up again in rapid succession, and others as well, each bouncingonto stage from the left as its predecessor scampers off to the right. The bumpycourse of these lines of thought, with some connected to others by labyrinthineroutes too involuted to ponder during the daydream itself and too opaque ever to becaptured entirely, forms an assemblage underdetermined by any logical, narrative, orexplanatory line of progression. It might go anywhere. Today the pace and numberof such thoughts may inspire you to ponder, as if for the first time, those tiny gaps ofemptiness that separate each thought from the next. You fall into a reverie as youponder how, in moments of affective intensity, quick little thoughts often follow oneanother in rapid succession, with little apparent rhyme or reason. Your thinkingnow slows down as you ponder how often a few thoughts fly by so fast you can’t grabthem long enough to explore them, even though you may wish desperately that youcould pull this or that one back just after it has disappeared over the edge. These arethe escapees: they may or may not return, and if some of them do they are apt to doso in an altered form induced by the changed context of their arrival. As you day-

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dream in this way, the gaps themselves may grow longer. You now make fugitive con-tact with those recurrent instants of apparent emptiness that set crucial conditions ofpossibility for new thoughts to arise. You thus slide a little closer to that doorwayfrom which the virtual register opens onto the stage of consciousness. It allows newthoughts to stroll or run onto stage, now and then setting an internal dialogue intomotion that brings something new or exciting into being. Attention to this fugitivedoorway discloses how thought is always already under way by the time you place it under theincomplete governance of intentionality and public expression. You now come to termsmore vividly with the indispensability and insufficiency of subjectivity to thought.For between two thoughts all kinds of affects play their game; but their motions aretoo fast, therefore we fail to recognize them . . .

A multidimensional process of thinking has occurred here. First,there is the dissonant conjunction between the scene and the distinctive thoughts itmight rapidly mobilize in people with different, affectively imbued memory banks.Second, the initial encounter may later spur more disciplined thinking about thefugitive relation between the virtual register and consciousness in thought. And third,the conjunction of the first two moments might later yet encourage a disciplinedtrain of thought about the relations among affect, discipline, and technique in bothfomenting new thoughts and enabling a disciplined train of thought. For disciplineand logic are both essential to a sustained train of thought. We pursue this third trackin chapter 4.

Here we focus on a related question: Does attention to the roleof affect in the mobility of thought denigrate the role of language? Not at all. First,linguistic distinctions, in the largest sense of that idea, are differentially mixed intoaffective states at each level of complexity, even if they do not exhaust them and evenif many thoughts move too fast to render the linguistic element explicit. Affect wouldbe more brutish than it is without language. It would thus not be able to play thecritical role it does in the consolidation of culturally imbued habits and regularities.Indeed, as we shall see more closely in chapter 4, not only is each level of intrasub-jectivity invested with an element of intersubjectivity appropriate to its capacity, theactivity of thinking itself involves a set of layered correspondences between intrasub-jective coding and intersubjective props, linguistic supports and nonlinguistic tech-niques. The body/brain network is indispensable to thinking, but radically insuffi-cient to it.

Second, when you express proto-thoughts and thoughts in con-versation, the public context of the expression changes the proto-thoughts broughtinto being. Expression alters what is expressed in the act of expressing it. Since the

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pace of thinking moves faster than the pace of public expression, only some thingsare articulated at any one time. More fundamentally, the public context of articula-tion has significant effects on what is said, how it is said, and how it is received.

Most critically of all, affect is involved in that tricky process bywhich the outside of thought is translated into thought. This is the disjunctive con-nection that expressive theories of language too often either ignore or invest as if bynecessity with a predesign of being.32 Heidegger does not ignore this juncture, how-ever. He suggests that the essence of language is insufficiently disclosed by comingto terms with the way it sets the intersubjective background to thinking and com-munication. That feature of language must be considered alongside a corollary fea-ture, for language “speaks itself as language” when you find yourself searching forthe right word to express a thought and cannot find it. Sometimes you have forgotten,say, the name of a person. That situation is not the one Heidegger has in mind, butbefore we get to his point, let’s first note something in the situation that Heideggerhimself bypasses. If you forget a name, there is an absence where you want a pres-ence. But it is not a situation of pure emptiness. Perhaps you remember vaguely therhythm of the name — da, da, da, rather than da, da — and use that recollection to helpyou out. Or perhaps you recall a similar name each time you are trying to call upthat one, and you see how this is blocking you. These examples show how forgettingdoes not involve a pure absence, for if it did you could never recognize the correctname when it finally surfaces. They suggest how layered and multidimensional think-ing is, for if you forget a name it may be difficult to recall it, but if you forget therhythm too, it may be lost forever.

Heidegger himself has bigger fish to fry. For “when the issue isto put into language something which has never yet been spoken, then everythingdepends on whether language gives or withholds the appropriate word. Such is thecase of the poet.”33

“Such is the case of the poet.” We have wandered into an evenmore opaque, yet fecund level of being. To coin a new word or phrase for an inchoate,affectively imbued thought is both to express what has not yet found articulation andto change the dark precursor as it is drawn into an intersubjective network of simi-larities and contrasts. But to place a new word or phrase into an established networkis also to alter the network itself in a small or large way. This is the double processthat marks both creativity in thinking and the politics of becoming.

To take a modest example, if, inhabiting a predominantly Chris-tian/secular society, you feel with a vague intensity that the options theism/atheism

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and believer/nonbeliever are too confining for the sensibility you strain to express, youmight eventually coin the phrase nontheistic gratitude to fill the gap. The point of thephrase is to articulate an existential faith that makes contact with dominant alterna-tives without being entirely reducible to any. The coinage of the new phrase flowsfrom a fugitive encounter between the dominant terms of discourse and a thoughtbubbling up that touches those terms without finding sufficient space of articulationwithin them. In this case the experience of absence is filled by an alternative thatboth recalls an Epicurean philosophy set in a pre-Christian world and speaks to asubmerged perspective in contemporary life. The inchoate thought spurring the ar-ticulation is changed by the articulation, since the new phrase now becomes situatedin a set of contrasts heretofore unavailable to it. But the new articulation, as it be-comes sharpened and clarified, also modifies the established web of contrasts byidentifying an alternative that can now be brought to bear in characterizing and ap-praising the dominant orientations. Nontheistic gratitude may at first sound like anoxymoron to those who expect the phrase’s two terms to retain all the dimensionspreviously attached to them. This may be particularly true of those who have for-gotten how much creative work Augustine and Augustinians once had to do totranslate Platonic philosophy into Latin and Christianity. In the phrase nontheisticgratitude, for instance, gratitude is now linked to the gift of being as a protean set ofenergies that enable various identities and exceed the existing pool of identities; itgives priority to a sensibility that affirms this world. In this respect, as we shall see inchapter 5, it makes contact with some mystical traditions within religions of theBook. Similarly, the introduction of nontheistic as adjective rather than noun pointsbeyond the idea of atheism as the mere denial of belief in God, as that term has tradi-tionally been understood in Christendom.34

If you are inordinately lucky, you may eventually find such aphrase accepted as describing a legitimate orientation to being in the world. Thishypothetical example brings out several dimensions of language in relation to think-ing. There is, first, the creative effect that the introduction of a new word or phrasecan have upon the web of public contrasts that preceded it, revealing an absence ret-rospectively where none had been experienced by most before. There is, second, theway public recognition of the new formulation can express something in your sensi-bility as it renders that sensibility more available to others. There is, third, how thesensibility expressed can now become an object of representation, and how the repre-sented object, in turn, can now be examined, refined, criticized, and revised in publicdiscourse because of its new status. That is, it can itself become an object of thought,

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sending thought off in new directions.35 There is, fourth, the practical opportunitythat the coining, expression, and representation of the new phrase creates for youand others to work on yourselves to render your actual sensibilities more congruentwith the self-representation you advance. Let us call this fourth element the self-tacticalor self-organizational dimension of linguistic expression. Attention to this dimensionshows how thinking crisscrosses between the brains of thinkers and the public worldsin which they participate. Even more, it reveals how public expression faces in twodirections: toward the world and toward those individuals and constituencies whosereiterated self-expressions induce effects upon themselves that strengthen or modifytheir sensibilities. The self-organizational effects of expression are most effectivewhen they work in conjunction with corollary practices of posture, attentiveness,touch, and imagery. Think, for instance, about how while playing tennis you mightsay to yourself, “Follow through all the way” as you rehearse the requisite motion inthe air after having missed your first serve, or “Look the ball all the way in” just afterhaving missed the “sweet spot” when you hit the ball. Augustine illuminated theself-forming or compositional capacities of discursive life when he perfected Chris-tian confessional practices. For him the purpose was both to express the faith of Chris-tian believers and to form the confessors into more faithful beings.36 The expressive,representational, creative, and self-organizational dimensions of language often worktogether: in enabling thought, in regulating it, and in strengthening or modifyingthe sensibility from which it proceeds.

Let us return to the point in Heidegger’s account of language atwhich the right word could not be found. To attend to this fugitive corporeo-culturaljuncture prior to articulation of a new concept is certainly not to come to know theunthought before it has been translated into language. Such knowledge is impossi-ble, for this absence, unlike forgetting a name, does not yet conform to the shape ofthat which is knowable. To attend to such an uncanny moment is to place yourself ina better position to appreciate the role that stuttering, gurgles, smirks, guffaws,tears, timbre of the voice, facial expression, posture, and hand movements play inlinguistic expression. Such eye movements, rhythms, gestures, and nonconceptualsounds attached to speech sometimes point to subterranean elements on the edge ofthought that do not now find verbal expression. They point to the excess of affectover the context of expression even as they add texture and density to expression.Attention to this uncanny moment also puts you in a better position to work uponthose fugitive registers of being that are pertinent to stability or innovation in thoughtbut unamenable to argument or representation. There is much more to thinkingthan argument.


An expressive philosophy of language, then, points not to the ir-relevance but to the insufficiency of both designative and constitutive theories of lan-guage. But it too is insufficient to the affective, layered character of thinking until itacknowledges how affect both becomes mixed into language and is never entirely ex-hausted by those mixtures. As we shall see more closely in the next chapter, somebrain nodules in the human brain network have the capacity to register only intense,crude inscriptions, whereas others to which the first are connected are capable oflinguistic refinement. But in the process of thinking, all of them form a complex series ofloops and counterloops with each other, the rest of the body, and the larger culture. The mo-bility of affect not only contributes to the movement of thought, then: it is also a keyto that ubiquitous and magical process by which the outside of thought crosses intothinking territory.

You cannot appreciate the creative possibilities in thinking with-out coming to terms with the layered play of affect in it; but you cannot fit thoughtentirely into a closed schema of logic, narrative, discourse, expression, or explanationif you do attend to the play of affect. It is through the play of affect — partly withinthe orbit of feeling, intention, and consciousness and partly below their thresholds —that the creative element of thinking finds its most energetic impetus and possibility.For, again, attention to the role of affect in thought brings out how thinking is al-ready under way as you strain to compose a train of thought. New thoughts bubble,flow, or surge into being from a virtual register hard at work below the threshold offeeling and intellectual attention. Since affect is not entirely under the regulation ofconsciousness, the flow of thinking exceeds its governance too.

I resist the tendency, sometimes operative in Nietzsche, to en-close thinking entirely within the complex social structure of the individual. Think-ing is not only layered “vertically,” so to speak. Several layers within resonate inter-subjectively, endowing culture with interacting levels of complexity. Indeed, the onlytheory of intersubjectivity worth its salt is one in which intersubjective connectionsand dissonances move across several registers.

The contagion of affect flows across bodies as well as across con-versations, as when anger, revenge, or inspiration is communicated across individualsor constituencies by the timbre of our voices, looks, hits, caresses, gestures, the bunch-ing of muscles in the neck, and flushes of the skin. Such contagion flows through face-to-face meetings, academic classes, family dinners, public assemblies, TV speeches,sitcoms, soaps operas, and films. Affect is infectious across layered assemblages, hu-man and otherwise. Nietzsche knew this, but sometimes depreciated it, as when hetreated language as the site of the herd and the average and the unconscious as the

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site of the singular and unique. This is the juncture, as we shall see in the next chap-ter, where Gilles Deleuze makes a significant contribution to the Nietzschean imageof thought.37

The Ubiquity of Affect

So thoughts are invested with affect. That may be one reason corporeal human beingsare often so loyal to the thoughts that survive the competition within the subliminalfield long enough to enter the field of consciousness for further work. Einstein, forinstance, was deeply committed to his idea of the illusion of time, more so than thespeculative status of the theory alone required. He is by no means unique in this re-spect. Part of the affective energy mixed into thought becomes available to conscious-ness as feelings and concept-imbued emotions; but other thought-imbued energiesfind symptomatic expression in the timbre of our voices, the calmness or intensity ofour gestures, our facial expressions, the flush of our faces, the rate of our heartbeats,the receptivity, tightness, or sweatiness of our skin, and the relaxation or turmoil inour guts. Moreover, the play of affect on some registers is not always entirely conso-nant with its play on others.

Recent experiments by neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasioand Joseph LeDoux confirm the indispensability of affect to thinking. But if affectretains an element of autonomy that pulls thinking beyond the steady control of in-tellectual governance, how could this dimension of thinking itself be refined or sharp-ened? If affect, that is, becomes organized into habits of feeling and judgment thatflow into the intellect, by what means can this dimension of being be reeducated?Intellectualists tend to ignore the question, for they assume that it is only at thehighest level of intellectuality that thinking and education count. Virtue theorists,on the other hand, attend to it. But they are often prepared to do so only if the ques-tion is defined within a theo-teleological matrix. These two parties often concur inthinking that the debate between them exhausts the viable possibilities. One meansby which this mutual sense of exhaustion is maintained is through the reduction ofNietzschean nonteleological philosophy to a form of voluntarism that ignores its en-gagement with the interplay among embodiment, affect, thought, and becoming.

Nietzsche resists this reduction when he poses the question ofhow to educate affectively imbued dispositions below the level of direct intellectualregulation. Nietzsche — the philosopher who celebrates thinking all the way up andall the way down — explores techniques and arts to work on culturally imbued di-mensions of affective thought unsusceptible to direct regulation. As he puts it in athought pregnant with ethical and political import: “a mere disciplining of [conscious]

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thoughts and feelings is virtually nothing . . . ; one first has to convince the body. It isdecisive . . . that one should inaugurate culture in the right place — not in the ‘soul’ . . . :the right place is the body, demeanor, diet, physiology, the rest follows.”38

Nietzsche here looks back to Spinoza, without endorsing the ra-tionalist canopy within which the latter encloses the corporeal adventures of thought.He also anticipates Bergson in his focus on the encounter between inner (“proprio-ceptive”) and outer perception in the organization of perception, thinking, and judg-ment. While he ratchets down the significance of consciousness by comparison tothe transcendental traditions, consciousness nonetheless retains two crucial powersin his presentation. First, it plays an indispensable organizing and regulatory role inthinking, even if it is not self-sufficient or autonomous. Logic and language are thuspertinent to thinking as Nietzsche conceives it — they are just insufficient. Second,consciousness enables humans to devise experimental practices and arts by which towork on affect-imbued thoughts below its direct regulation but pertinent to its con-scious deliberations. Nietzsche calls these experimental disciplines modes of self-“artistry.” Changing your thinking on something fundamental to your identity ofteninvolves work on layers below consciousness, but to assess the effects of those exper-iments is to bring consciousness back into play.

To ennoble the significance of thinking for life, Nietzsche re-fuses to put its dangers on ice. He knows, too, that because of the very layered char-acter of thinking others may not be moved to endorse or reject his image by intel-lectual means alone. Sure, arguments that open up new images of nature and cultureare terribly pertinent. And a refined ear for paradox helps. But the suspicion that thesemodalities are not sufficient to those debates is supported by the fact that today sev-eral models of nature, culture, thought, ethics, and science remain locked in compe-tition, with none to date sealed by a transcendental argument or recourse to conclu-sive evidence that requires all reflective thinkers to adopt it. Put another way, thewhisper or screech of affect traverses every argument, helping to nudge the move-ment of this porous activity (for no discursive argument is airtight) or to foment dis-turbance inside it. Or both.

What else, then, might nudge the intellect in Nietzsche’s direc-tion on the question of thinking? Nietzsche would say that the issue turns in part onthe existential orientation to life already installed in you by historical fortuity andinstitutional design. These previous interventions shape and define, to some uncer-tain degree, visceral layers that enter into your judgment about how thinking works.In opening the intellect to think anew about the character of thinking, then, it is use-ful to run little experiments on ourselves. Those who from time to time feel little surges

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of nontheistic reverence for an abundance of being without intrinsic purpose or finalorder might work experimentally to install this affirmation of life more actively intomultiple zones of the body. You work “to convince the body” to incorporate theimage of nature, culture, and thinking that you intellectually entertain as a belief.You might, say, behave experimentally like an immanent naturalist for a month, en-couraging yourself to meditate about the abundance of being in an undesigned worldas others pray to its designer, to tap into latent feelings of joy that may already accom-pany such a thought, and to forge “brief habits” that express gratitude for that abun-dance. Perhaps you will then hold a dance party to music by the Buena Vista SocialClub. As you proceed, you read studies about the looping interactions among theeight or nine brain regions of different speed, initiating function and capacity, al-lowing those studies to sharpen your powers of attentiveness to your own activitiesof perception, thinking, and judgment. And so on. After a few months you consultyour thinking again to see what chords of existential gratitude might have beenstruck, what ideas are beginning to crystallize, what new possibilities you now seekto enact.

To run such existential experiments is to add a layer of tests tothe appraisal of Nietzsche’s perspective already in motion. No test has been subtracted.You may or may not be converted. The outcome is unpredictable. Whether theseexperiments do or do not turn the trick, however, your considered judgment maynow become inhabited by a deeper sense of modesty and reserve. For while yourhighest capacities of reflection are now mobilized for or against the Nietzscheanimage of thinking and nature, you also sense that a series of contestable proto-thoughtsbehind those thoughts has been mobilized on behalf of that very judgment. So youmay strive to fold a measure of modesty and hesitancy into the account you endorse,out of respect for the affective, layered complexity of thinking and for others whoengage it differently. To respect the complexity of thinking is to hesitate to reachagreement too fast or too completely on the most fundamental matters.

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The Transcendental and the ImmanentHerein I would fain that you should learn this too, that when the primordiaare being carried downwards straight through the void by their own weight,at times quite undetermined and at undetermined spots they push a little from theirpath: yet only just so much as you could call a change of trend. But if theywere not used to swerve, all things would fall downwards through the deepvoid like drops of rain, nor could collision come to be, nor a blow brought topass for the primordia: so nature would never have brought anything intoexistence. . . .

Now I say that mind and anima are held in union with the other, andform of themselves a single nature, but that the head, as it were, and lord inthe whole body is the reason which we call mind or understanding, and it isfirmly seated in middle region of the breast. For here it is that fear and ter-ror throb, around these parts are soothing joys; there, then is the under-standing and the mind. The rest of the anima, spread abroad, throughout thebody, obeys and is moved at the will and inclination of the understanding.1

the naturalism of lucretius has long seemed too crude and perplexing to musterserious support. It construes the smallest constituents of nature to move so fast andchaotically that they cannot become objects of perception or precise explanation; it

Techniques of Thought and

Micropolitics

treats the mind to be made up of material of the same type — although not the samecapacity — as the rest of the body, or animus; it links thinking to the instabilities ofsense experience; it locates the mind in the middle region of the breast rather thanthe head; it has difficulty making sense of free will and responsibility, even while ac-knowledging the need to do so; its naturalism gives no powers to divinity; it cangenerate no authoritative basis for morality in the last instance beyond the capacityto achieve a life of tranquility or ataraxy; and it counsels its followers to work tacti-cally on the subconscious dispositions that project life forward after death in orderto make peace with death as oblivion. Its speculations were too disconnected fromthe project of deep explanation to gain support in early modern natural science and too committed to naturalism to win praise from the Christian philosophies ofAugustine, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. And most of the Epicurean textsto which Lucretius was indebted have been lost through a long history of culturalwar against that philosophy.

Things may be changing. Ilya Prigogine’s conception of dissipa-tive structures in nature, as we saw in chapter 3, bears a family resemblance to thephysics of Epicurus and Lucretius. And today several neuroscientists conclude thatthe lower region of the breast, while not as complex as the brain system in the head,houses a simple cortical complex that communicates with higher brain regions toissue intense feelings of disgust, anxiety, fear, and terror. Thinking itself is mixedinto these intensities, some of which are felt and others of which move below thelevel of explicit feeling. The fast, imperceptible units Lucretius called “primordia”bear a family resemblance not only to atoms but to the electrical fields that carrythinking. As Tor Nørretranders says in his review of recent brain research, “A stimuluscan be so short that we never become conscious of it but react to it nevertheless.”2

Moreover, some neuroscientists are moving under their own steamto modify the linear and mechanical concepts of causality that were popular in thefield earlier. As Rafael Nuñez, a neuroscientist, says in a review of work in his field,in “the last couple of decades . . . there has been a tendency to move from a rational,abstract, culture-free, de-centralized, non-biological, ahistorical, unemotional, asocialand disembodied view of the mind towards a view which sees the mind as situated, de-centralized, real-time constrained, everyday experience oriented, culture-dependent,contextualized, and closely related to biological principles — in one word, embod-ied.”3 Finally, tactical work on dispositions installed below consciousness, whileminimized by neo-Kantian philosophies in the traditions of Rawls and Habermas,concerns contemporary neuroscience in a way reminiscent of the tactical orientationto being and thinking propagated by Epicurus and Lucretius.

T e c h n i q u e s o f T h o u g h t

Recent brain research is suggestive, both in its presentation ofnonconscious operations that precede consciousness by a half second and in its sug-gestions about the role technique plays in thinking and judgment. Take the case ofthe blind man who could not form images of objects within the range of normal vi-sion. Nonetheless, he, like others with this particular malady, was able to carry outnumerous activities, such as riding a bike, usually reserved for those with vision.When presented in a test with a series of arrows pointing in different directions, hewas able to identify the correct direction in which the arrow pointed almost everytime. He thought he was inordinately lucky. He, however, had “blindsight”: the partof the brain that forms images is damaged, while “the other links between the eyeand the brain” function well.4 Here is a dramatic illustration of how large chunks ofperception are organized below perceptual awareness. Or consider the sixteen-year-old girl who a team of neurophysiologists at the University of California, Los Angeles,studied to identify the causes of her epileptic seizures. Applying an electric probe toeighty-five separate spots on her left frontal lobe, they eventually hit by chanceupon a patch of brain where application of the probe made her laugh. They foundthat the “duration and intensity of the laughter increased with the level of stimula-tion current. . . . At low currents only a smile was present, while at higher currents a robust, contagious laughter was induced.”5 The young girl, following the time-honored principle of retrospective interpretation, decided that these researcherswere extremely funny guys. These two cases suggest that a lot of thinking and inter-pretation go on during the “half-second delay” between the reception of sensorymaterial and conscious interpretation of it.6 They further point to the gaps that oftenopen up between phenomenological interpretations of experience and third-personaccounts of it.

A half-second delay? It can be illustrated phenomenologically.When you place your hand over a hot stove, your hand recoils before you experiencea feeling of pain, even though you tend to interpret the recoil as if it were caused bythe feeling that followed it. The reflex action precedes the feeling commonly thoughtto cause it; in this case, at least, close attention to the order of action can verify thediscrepancy between normal retrospective interpretation of temporal order and theactual order. It seems that “incomprehensible quantities of unconscious calculation”7

take place during the half-second delay between the reception of sensory materialand the consolidation of perceptions, feelings, and judgments. A lot of material issubtracted, and the remainder is crunched into a set of perceptions and thought-imbued intensities that consciousness can now do further work upon. Immanuel Kant,let us say, projects an inscrutable transcendental field into this temporal gap.8 We

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presuppose this transcendental, supersensible field, he claims, when we explain thingsaccording to laws of the understanding; but we cannot inquire further into the con-cepts of time, space, and causality it sanctions.

This schematism of our understanding in regard to appearances and theirmere form, is an art, hidden in the depths of the human soul, whose true modesof action we shall only with difficulty discover and unveil. . . . The image is aproduct of the empirical faculty of the productive imagination — while theschema of the sensible concepts (of figures in space, for example), is a productof the pure imagination a priori. . . . It is a transcendental product of the imag-ination . . . , insofar as these representations must be connected a priori in oneconcept, conformable to the unity of apperception.9

The transcendental field provides the understanding with cate-gories necessary to explanation. That same field operates more directly, but with thesame necessity and inscrutability, in Kantian moral judgment. The “objective realityof the moral law” is recognized “as an apodictically certain fact, as it were, of purereason, a fact of which we are a priori conscious.” It “can be proved through no de-duction. . . . Nevertheless it is firmly established of itself.”10 The closure and rigiditythat some discern in Kantian morality — in, for example, his confident commitmentto capital punishment and his refusal to allow someone to lie even to save the life ofanother — may be bound to his insistence that the experience of morality as lawtakes the form of incontestable apodictic recognition. Finally, aesthetic judgmentalso falls under the jurisdiction of the supersensible realm. To judge something to bebeautiful is to attain a spontaneous accord of the faculties that expresses the dictatesof the supersensible realm without being able to conceptualize them.

Apperception in explanation, recognition in morality, expressionin aesthetic judgment — the Kantian models of explanation, morality, and aestheticsinvoke in different ways an inscrutable supersensible field prior to consciousness thatregulates its operations.11 The introduction of the transcendental field enabled Kantto devise a creative strategy to protect Christian freedom and morality from the cor-rosive effects of the Newtonian science of mechanics he also endorsed. The crucialmove is “to ascribe the existence of a thing so far as it is determinable in time, and ac-cordingly its causality under the law of natural necessity, merely to appearance, and toattribute freedom to the same being as a thing in itself.”12 The Kantian supersensiblefield thus subsists below the level of consciousness and above the reach of modifica-tion through scientific knowledge, moral decision, or technical intervention. Such aphilosophy enabled Kant to disparage naturalists such as Epicurus and Lucretius for

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sinking into a metaphysical dogmatism that pretends to know the “thing in itself”and for anchoring ethics in something as crude as the sensible realm.

But what happens if we set the half-second delay not in a super-sensible domain but in the corporealization of culture and cultural inscriptions ofcorporeal processes? What if many messages flowing between multiple brain regionsof differential capacities in the same person are too small and fast to be identified byconsciousness but are, nonetheless, amenable to some degree to cultural inscription,experimental research, and technical intervention? Does this open a door not todisproof of the Kantian transcendental and proof of the alternative but to a contend-ing interpretation of the transcendental field that moves closer to Lucretius? It maybe that Kant’s identification of an inscrutable transcendental field is profound, whilehis insistence that it must be eternal, supersensible, and authoritative in the last in-stance is open to modification. To contest the Kantian reading of the transcendentalfield, while appreciating that some such field is inscrutable to those implicated in it,is eventually to call into question both the Kantian images of thought and moralityand the images of those neo-Kantians who often proceed as if they can avoid such afield altogether. Neo-Kantians tend to reduce arts of the self to “therapies” to dealwith neuroses or blockages in the powers of normal rationality, recognition, deliber-ation, and decision, rather than ubiquitous exercises, tools, and techniques helpingto shape thinking and sensibility in profound ways.

The key move is to translate the Kantian transcendental fieldinto a layered, immanent field. If the unconscious dimension of thought is at onceimmanent in subsisting below the direct reach of consciousness, effective in influenc-ing conduct on its own and also affecting conscious judgment, material in being em-bodied in neurological processes, and cultural in being given part of its shape by pre-vious inscriptions of experience and new experimental interventions, then severaltheories of morality, ranging from the Kantian model of command through the Haber-masian model of deliberative ethics and the Rawlsian model of justice, to the Tay-lorite model of attunement to a higher purpose in being, may deserve active contes-tation. From the vantage point pursued here, some of the above theories systematicallyunderplay the role of technique and artistry in thinking and ethics while othersoverestimate the degree to which the cultivation of an ethical sensibility is linked toan intrinsic purpose susceptible to general attunement or recognition.

Immanence and Thinking

By naturalism, I mean the idea that all human activities function without the aid of adivine or supernatural force. The specific form of naturalism I embrace questions

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the sufficiency of the lawlike model of nature endorsed by classical natural science.And it emphasizes how culture gets differentially mixed into natural processes, de-pending upon the capacity for complexity of the mode of being in question. Let usconstrue eliminative naturalism to be a philosophy that reduces the experience ofconsciousness to nonconscious processes. Let us construe mechanical naturalism to beone that denies any role to a supersensible field while finding both the world of non-human nature and the structure of the human brain to be amenable “in principle” toprecise representation and complete explanation. I am not sure how many eliminativeor mechanical naturalists there are today, although many philosophers and cognitivescientists are represented as such by those critics who endorse transcendentalism. Animmanent naturalist, by comparison, does not repudiate the transcendental. Rather, itis translated into an immanent field that mixes nature and culture. To immanentnaturalism, consciousness emerges as a layer of thinking, feeling, and judgmentbound to complex crunching operations that enable and exceed it. The immanentfield is efficacious and inscrutable (to an uncertain degree), but not immaterial. It is,you might say, infrasensible rather than supersensible. Moreover, the immanentfield, while currently unsusceptible to full explanation and unsusceptible in principleto precise representation, may retain some amenability to both cultural inscriptionand experimental tactics of intervention. That is, as the practices of Buddhists, Epi-cureans, and several monotheistic religions have presumed for centuries, humanpowers of cultural inscription and experimental intervention into the inscrutabledomain, while limited, nonetheless exceed those of direct conscious control and sci-entific explanation.

Finally, immanent naturalists resist both a command model ofmorality set in a juridical rendering of the transcendental field and a teleologicalimage of ethics set in a divine order of things. We do not deny that pressures and di-rectives flooding into consciousness from the infrasensible field often feel as if theyexpress “the apodictically certain fact of pure reason”; we simply contest the conclu-sion that such a recognition actually does express “the objective reality of the morallaw itself.” To us nature is more diverse and interesting than any god, and the bodyis more layered, rich, and creative than the soul. Most immanent naturalists supportan ethic in which visceral attachment to life and the world provides the preliminarysoil from which commitment to more generous identifications, responsibilities, andconnections might be cultivated. Such a preliminary disposition is fundamental inthat without it further cultivation of generosity and responsibility could not proceed.But it is also fragile in that, while such a gratitude for being is very often mixed intothe milk of life, there is no cosmic guarantee that it must be so, or if so, that it will

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necessarily prevail against experiences of profound injury, loss, violence, or brutality.The admirability of a generous ethos of cultural life is stalked by its fragility.

According to these rough-and-ready standards, thinkers as diverseas Epicurus, Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Stuart Hampshire,Gilles Deleuze, Jane Bennett, Moira Gatens, Brian Massumi, Paul Patton, and BernardWilliams participate in immanent naturalism. Other (possible) naturalists such as,say, John Rawls, Bertrand Russell, Hans Blumenberg, and Nancy Fraser, while oftenappreciating the need for cultural diversity and ethical generosity, may still not doso. This is the case partly because they adopt conceptions of nature that are closer tothe classical conception of modern science; partly because they do not project an im-manent field of perception, thinking, interpretation, identity, and judgment; andpartly because they do not actively explore the political issues and ethical possibili-ties that arise when thinkers engage reflexively the exercises, disciplines, techniques,and impositions that help give shape to thought.

If naturalism in all its forms presents a minority report withincontemporary moral and political philosophy, immanent naturalism constitutes adissenting opinion within the minority report. Its minority status becomes morenotable when you think about citizens at large in most western states. Most citizens,particularly in the United States, opt for one or another conception of morality de-rived from a supersensible realm. Some high articulations of such a perspective,presented by figures as diverse as Charles Taylor, Immanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur,Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Sandel, ascribe considerable importance in think-ing and ethics to the “tacit dimension” and the “embodied self.” But they forsakeimmanent naturalism in the last instance for a divine rendering of the transcenden-tal field. Some of these same figures claim a monopoly over the shape of morality,while others acknowledge the comparative contestability of their own faith and thecredibility of immanent naturalism as a competitor.13 The question is what happensto the monopoly rights over morality claimed by the rest when a set of immanentnaturalists rewrite the transcendental rather than erasing it. Even more enchantingare the positive possibilities of selective alliance between theists and immanent nat-uralists opened up by this intervention, for immanent naturalists join transcendentaltheists in bestowing considerable significance upon the inscrutable, and several par-ties on both sides of this divide also acknowledge the profound contestability oftheir interpretations of the immanent/transcendental field.

To think, according to the OED, is “to cause (something) to appear(to oneself),” “to form connected ideas of any kind,” and “to form a definite conceptionby a conscious mental act, to picture in one’s mind.” These definitions, taken together,

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have the advantage of including both conscious and unconscious processes under therubric of thinking. Let us treat thinking, provisionally and roughly, as those activi-ties through which conclusions and judgments are reached and new connectionsamong ideas are generated. That leaves open how layered thinking is, the role of in-tensity, mood, and sensibility in it, and the relation of technique to it. A technique ofthought might be an exercise or other intervention that alters the direction of think-ing or the mood in which it is set. An electrical probe becomes a technique of thoughtwhen applied purposively to a patch of the brain; clearing your mind of everydayconcerns while going on a long, slow run in the woods can be another. Kant, whoplaces thought under the juridical control of inscrutable reason, would distinguishsharply between thinking that conforms to the dictates of reason and thinking alteredin its direction by external tactics. Therapies and disciplines can refine or coarsen in-clinations outside the medium of thought, but in a Kantian world correct thinking it-self is organized under the legislative guidance of reason. A transcendental illusion,for instance, occurs when thinking wanders beyond the limits in which it is properlyset. Lucretius, on the other hand, finds that jumps and starts within thinking provideit with some of its creative moments. He commends tactical work on the texture ofone’s own thought for ethical reasons. You might, for instance, strive to imagine theserenity of death as oblivion every time your heated imagination projects rewardsand punishments into an afterlife; you do so to ease your resentment against mortal-ity and, therefore, to render yourself less likely to act cruelly toward others. StuartHampshire, indebted to both Lucretius and Spinoza, also finds the Kantian distinc-tion between correct thinking and distortion to be forced. The evanescent activity ofthinking occurs as cultural elements are folded into complex neurophysiological cir-cuits. Thinking is irreducible to any of the preliminary ingredients that enable it,but it is affected profoundly by the material medium of its occurrence. Writing in1970, before the recent surge in brain research, Hampshire says:

In all probability physical structures of a kind that we cannot now even be-gin to envisage are involved in the acquisition of language and mathematicalskills, in the exercise of memory and of the imagination, and in the forma-tion of complex sentiments and mental attitudes. . . . Indeed the word “mech-anism,” which I have introduced, may be thought misleading in so far as it isassociated only with types of physical processes, which are not yet recog-nized, or even envisaged, in contemporary physics.14

Hampshire treats the mechanisms “at work at different levels, orin different types of thinking” as themselves potential objects of knowledge and in-

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tervention. He agrees with his hero Spinoza in regretting that most philosophers inthe past

could not bring themselves consistently to view human beings solely as onekind of natural object among others. Under the influence of inherited moraland religious ideas, and of their natural pieties, his predecessors had alwayskept some powers of mind in reserve, treating these superior powers of thoughtas if they transcended the natural order. . . . They seemed to have assumedthat those powers of mind, which are the conditions of any organized knowl-edge of natural processes, cannot themselves be made the objects of suchknowledge.15

Immanuel Kant, as Hampshire says, continues the tradition ofprotecting “those powers of mind” from being “made the objects of such knowledge.”He gave the pious tradition new energy and confidence in the eighteenth century byrewriting it to protect it from the challenges posed by Spinoza and Newton, respec-tively. Hampshire, resisting Kant under the influence of Spinoza, pursues a more re-flexive naturalism than that offered by Lucretius. He emphasizes the importance of“shifting attention back and forth from the consideration of persons as active ob-servers of the physical world to the consideration of them as also observed objects,with their bodies in a dual role, as both purposely used instruments of explorationand also as observed objects.”16 Here Hampshire translates the ontological paral-lelism of Spinoza into what might be called perspectival parallelism. According toSpinoza, thought and extension parallel each other perfectly, so that a change in oneof these “attributes” of substance is met by a corresponding change in the other,even though the two do not interact causally.17 Perspectival parallelism drops thereference to a singular substance with two parallel attributes. It asserts that humanbeings are unable to translate first-person experiences of perception, thinking, andjudgment neatly into third-person observations of the physicochemical processesoperative while those activities proceed. That is because the thinking in questiondraws upon and flows into a larger context or cultural world than that encompassedby the physicochemical processes under observation. Nonetheless, a significant changein the physicochemical process is met by some change in thought process, and viceversa. Appreciating the dual role you play as both thinker and student of brainprocesses that support thought enables you to explore actively how technical inter-vention might alter the ethos of thinking. You can apply techniques to yourself ex-perimentally to ascertain what new possibilities become discernible in your thinking,even though you are unable to translate the third-person or external perspective on

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thought into the experiential terms of thinking. I share this view with Hampshire.The thinker, Hampshire says, aware of the neurophysical instrument of thinking,knows that if “the condition of the instrument is grossly changed, as by drugs, thepower of thought is grossly changed also.”18

So the reflexive relation between first- and third-person perspec-tives suggests possible technical interventions, and such interventions can in turnhelp thought to become more reflexive. The reflexivity Hampshire commends is notreducible to Hegelian self-consciousness, since, as we have seen, he anticipates thatthe gap between the process of making connections in thought and explanations ofthe mechanisms of thought is unlikely to be closed entirely. Hampshire does not en-dorse the encompassing metaphysic of Geist, in which such closure is promised forthe future, because Geist itself takes the form of an implicit Idea striving to realize it-self in the world. Techniques of the self, for Hampshire, can be applied at numerouspoints where the mind finds its capacity to exercise conscious control over itself lim-ited or constrained. Such techniques aim at unconscious processes below the reliablereach of conscious regulation. Drugs, for instance, are to be neither honored nor de-preciated in general, but appraised in terms of the effects and side effects they haveon health, thinking, and sensibility. The same goes for ritual, diet, reading, posture,meditation, physical exercise, and films. Of course, many of these activities are typi-cally done for the comfort, sustenance, pleasure, or relaxation they offer; but some-times these same activities also involve experimental action by the self on its think-ing or relational sensibility.

Recent research into body/brain processes and the half-seconddelay suggests to me that as we come to understand more about the geology of body/brain processes we also see more clearly why lawlike explanations of these processeswill remain partial and incomplete. This is partly due to the reflexive arc that formsbetween new accounts of body/brain processes and the changes in self-interpretationand self-interventions they enable, and partly due to the complexity and variablespeeds of the body/brain/culture network. Thus the amygdala, an intense little brainnodule we have encountered before, participates in a system that generates rapid,coarse judgments in dangerous situations operating below the capacity of consciousassessment and feeling. Its relays to other, more sophisticated brain regions may notbe susceptible to complete tracking and close prediction, because the amygdala bothinfluences conduct on its own and bumps intensities into conscious thinking andjudgment that the complex brain regions then process according to their own capac-ities of reception, speed, and organization. The amygdala is a brain nodule involvedin those unconscious crunching operations during the half-second delay, working

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“sub-symbolically, in codes that are not decipherable consciously.” And “consciousnessseems to do things serially, more or less one at a time, whereas the unconscious mind,being composed of many different systems, seems to work more or less in parallel.”19

The conceptual connections formed in conscious thinking arenotoriously irreducible to causal explanation, and the rapid, parallel systems thatboth affect judgment directly and project thought-imbued intensities into conscious-ness may be too fast and variable in intensity to submit to close, situational compu-tation as well. Affect is a wild card in the layered game of thinking. Since the effectsof one system are bounced or bumped into other systems with different speeds andcapacities of reception, you would have to form a god’s-eye view of the entire com-plex as it unfolds in action to “explain” its operations at any specific time. The geol-ogy of thought is thus susceptible to third-person understanding, but the interlayer-ing of unconscious and conscious thinking in motion may transcend the reach of themost confident models of scientific explanation. This projection discloses anotherconnection between transcendental and immanent philosophies. The transcenden-tal — which for Kant lies beyond human knowledge even as it regulates thinking — istranslated by immanent naturalists into an infrasensible field that transcends con-sciousness and exceeds mechanistic models of scientific explanation. As such it re-tains some susceptibility to cultural inscription and technical intervention.

Hampshire tends to bypass affective variations in intensity initi-ated below feeling and conscious judgment that play such a significant role in theadventure of thought. You may not appreciate the jolts, charges, and flashes throughwhich conscious thinking is sometimes depressed and at other times inspired to newheights of creativity sufficiently until you come to terms with the complex relays andnumerous feedback loops in the body/brain system, even leaving to the side for themoment how those relays are linked to larger cultural processes. The following quo-tation from the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux indicates some of this complexity:

When the amygdala detects danger, it sends messages to the hypothalamus,which in turn sends messages to the pituitary gland, and the result is the re-lease of a hormone called ACTH. ACTH flows through the blood to theadrenal gland to cause the release of steroid hormone. In addition to reach-ing target sites in the body, the steroid hormone flows through the bloodinto the brain, where it binds to the receptors in the hippocampus, amygdala,prefrontal cortex, and other regions.20

Consider a recent development in cognitive science that resonateswith Hampshire’s recommendation to move back and forth between experimental/

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theoretical exploration of body/brain mechanisms and phenomenological attentionto the experience of thinking and judging. Researchers have begun to fill out thecomplex physical processes Hampshire could only gesture toward in the early 1970s.In doing so, they also call attention to the crucial role the world plays in these activ-ities. According to Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, severalpractitioners of cognitive science are now moving away from the calculative, infor-mation-processing, and representational models of mind that governed cognitivescience in its early stages.21 In a way reminiscent of Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, andHampshire, they now emphasize how the practical activities of embodied human be-ings give priority to “know-how” over propositional knowledge. They put emphasison the compositional dimension of thinking while playing down its representationalfunction. People, of course, do form representations. But these are not neutral rep-resentations of a world of objects waiting to be copied. They are operational repre-sentations by corporeal agents engaged in culturally mediated, practical activities ofperceiving, working, playing, deciding, evaluating, and judging in a world that si-multaneously responds to those operational representations and exceeds them. The“world” for these theorists now shifts from a stable repository of things to be repre-sented to a complex array of operational distinctions “enacted codependently” byhuman actors and the materials encountered. Such a theme of codependence callsinto question the model of pure representation with which modern cognitive sciencebegan. This is one of the reasons, Varela and his colleagues think, that the “contin-ued search for parallel processing algorithms has met with little success.”22

In fact an important and pervasive shift is beginning to take place in cogni-tive science under the very influence of its own research. This shift requiresthat we move away from the idea of the world as independent and extrinsicto the idea of a world as inseparable from the structure of these processes ofself-modification. . . . The key point is that such systems do not operate byrepresentation. Instead of representing an independent world, they enact aworld as a domain of distinctions that is inseparable from the structure em-bodied by the cognitive system.23

From my point of view, these authors do not play up enough thefugitive resistances, encounters, slippages, anomalies, paradoxes, and ambiguitiesthat recur to suggest that there is always an outside to any historical system of code-pendencies engendered. But, still, this shift in cognitive science does call the suffi-ciency of calculative and representational models of thought into question. It doesso by keeping in the forefront of attention how the composition of thinking and


judgment is indissolubly bound to complex relays between an intersubjective worldand body/brain processes. Calculative models of mind, the authors suggest, are unableto account for how a baby acquires a specific language “from dispersed daily utter-ances and can constitute meaningful objects from what seems to be a sea of lights.”24

This movement within cognitive science, then, speaks to Hamp-shire’s point about the tension and interdependence between experimental theoriesof body/brain activity and the phenomenological experience of perception, thinking,feeling, and judgment.

There are other connections as well. According to Varela et al.,there is a turn in experimental research that emphasizes how the dispositions andjudgments of the self emerge from complex relays between several systems in theself and the world rather than from “a central coordinator” in the self acting uponthe world. And, they suggest, this new insight can be brought into productive en-gagement with Buddhist practices that help people to overcome the demand to “grasp”a central coordinator not available for grabbing. Refined practices of meditation,that is, can be informed by research into brain activities, and brain/body researchcan encourage people to explore practices that relax this “grasping” tendency. If youlink the findings of recent cognitive theory to practices of meditation derived fromBuddhism, the authors suggest, you move into a better position, first, to accept theself without a central coordinator and, second, to respond generously to multiple ex-periences of being in a diverse world. Such an ethic of cultivation, as I will call it,constitutes their response to the danger of “nihilism” accompanying the critique of“a central coordinator” and “foundationalist epistemologies” previously extant incognitive theory.

This minority movement in cognitive theory both addresses theaspiration of Hampshire within analytic philosophy and touches Foucauldian andDeleuzian explorations of “tactics of the self” and “micropolitics.” I will now probepertinent resources in the latter tradition.

Thinking, Memory, Cinema

Lucretius concludes that the infinitesimal size, rapid speed, and unpredictable swervesof “primordia” render them ill suited to close or complete explanation. Prigogineand Varela et al. adopt similar views. And the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze resonateswith all three of these perspectives. Deleuze projects a virtual register of proto-thoughttoo fast for either conscious self-inspection or close third-person retrieval. Thisreading meshes with his exploration of how differential degrees of affective intensity inthought propel it in some directions rather than others, how such intensities render

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thinking too layered and wayward to be captured either by a calculative model or ajuridical model in the Kantian tradition, and how these intensities sometimes openup lines of flight through which new concepts are ushered into being.

Deleuze translates Kant’s story of the governance of thought bytranscendental reason in the last instance into one in which thinking is periodicallynudged, frightened, inspired, or terrorized into action by strange encounters. Hetreats Kantian recognition as a secondary formation often taken by the innocence ofconsciousness to be apodictic. New encounters can sometimes disturb this experi-ence of apodicticity. The connection between Kant and Deleuze, amid these differ-ences, is that both call attention to the fugitive flash point at which argument endsand either recognition or encounter commences. Both point, then, to the limits ofargument in moral and epistemological thought, although too few contemporaryKantians and neo-Kantians acknowledge this critical point of convergence. But,again, whereas Kant thinks the idea that morality takes the form of law is apodicticand authoritative, Deleuze contends that the conscious experience of apodicticitycan be subjected to critical interrogation and refiguration. For that which is taken tobe apodictic shifts historically and situationally. It can do so because the “syntheses”through which perceptions and judgments are formed are not merely active. Prior toactive syntheses, and setting the basis for them, are passive syntheses “which weavetheir repetitions in the depths of the heart, where laws do not yet exist.”25 Deleuze’sinterpretation of passive syntheses resonates with interpretations in contemporaryneuroscience of body/brain syntheses operating below the level of conscious regula-tion. Important ethical consequences flow from the historical shape given to passivesyntheses.

At its most creative, thinking for Deleuze is the invention of newconcepts and possibilities out of the experience of friction, first, between entrenchedsyntheses and unexpected events that disrupt them and, second, between judgmentsat one level of being and proto-judgments at a more virtual level. Deleuze agreeswith Hampshire in highlighting the importance of the reflexive arc in thinking. Buthe takes a further step. In concurrence with Bergson, Nietzsche, Prigogine, andStengers, he also contends that nature itself is unfinished and replete with microdif-ferentials that periodically accumulate to generate new things. Responding to the“dogmatic image of thought” in which Kant participated, Deleuze says, “Do notcount upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, countupon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise upand educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think.”26 Think-ing is often inspired by surprising encounters, either between new events and estab-

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lished thought-imbued conventions or between those conventions and somethingmute in the world that has not yet been translated (that is, lifted and altered) ontothe register of thought.

This something is an object not of recognition, but of a fundamental encounter.What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be graspedin a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichevertone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed.27

“A range of affective tones.” Deleuze attends to the dissonant re-lation between affectively imbued virtual memories and the movement of thought.He suggests that affectively imbued thinking is always already under way by thetime consciousness intervenes to pull it in this or that direction. Attentiveness to themultilayered character of thinking encourages him, as well, to think about how in-stitutional disciplines, micropolitical movements, and tactics of the self are deployedto move the affective organization of thought and judgment. It may be that the im-pressive power of culture to set scripts of thought falls short of governing the obliqueencounters, intensities, and connections operative in thinking itself. There is a wildelement in the intralayered, intersubjective organization of thinking that sometimesdrives it into a black hole and occasionally enables thinkers to usher new conceptsand ideas into being. Applying experimental techniques to oneself sometimes fostersa rethinking of cultural conventions. Techniques of thought, then, can function bothas disciplines of regularization and as periodic challenges to established scripts ofnormalization.

Let us examine more closely what Deleuze means by the “con-tingency of an encounter” and its place in thinking. The idea is introduced in hisearly work, but developed in the later work on cinema. There Deleuze pursues a lineinitiated by Walter Benjamin in 1936, when Benjamin explored, against objectionsfrom fellow critical theorists, how new techniques of film then emerging had “en-riched our field of perception.” Just as prior to Freud a slip of the tongue was likelyto go unnoticed, and after him it became an object of intense popular interest, “thefilm has brought about a similar deepening of apperception.”28 Deleuze too claimsthat by exploring the techniques of “modern cinema” — very roughly, the cinema ofa coterie of creative directors between 1940 and 1980 — we can map more closelythe geology of thought in everyday life. In fact, he claims that a subterranean inter-text has been formed between theories in neuroscience and creative film techniques,with each set of practitioners tacitly informed by the possibilities opened up by theother.

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Consider a few familiar film techniques. In the imaginary film Ihave in mind, synchronicity is maintained between sound and image, lighting is de-signed to promote a sense of realism, most shots are pitched at eye level to augmentthe spirit of realism, frames are kept open to give the viewer a sense of participatingin a scene that has not been closely choreographed, and the cuts between scenes aresmooth, suggesting clean transitions between events susceptible to full causal expla-nation or narrative integrity. Few films actually confine themselves to the abovetechniques, but the gathering together of such techniques does foster a sense ofdocumentary realism, narrative integration, and linear time. Such a film deflects theviewer’s attention from its intensive organization of image, lighting, dialogue, music,background noise, and cuts. It solicits an innocent model of perception.

Deleuze is fascinated by films that break with such techniques orthat use them distinctively. In doing so, they sometimes teach us about how memoryis assembled, perception is organized, and the adventure of thinking proceeds. Deleuzeexplores techniques such as closed frames, irrational cuts, experimental lighting, dis-sonance between sound and image, depth-of-field shots, high- and low-angle shots,and recomposition of the conventional rules of distance between characters. He isinterested in how these techniques work upon the visceral registers of viewers. Thesecompositional strategies sometimes call attention to themselves. The viewer is firstdragged through a set of choreographed thought-imbued feelings and then encour-aged to ponder how they were formatted.

Occasionally such techniques, in conjunction with the story linesthey portray, overwhelm the experience of linear time. As Bergson showed, in every-day perception the image is set in linear time; the virtual memories it folds into per-ception are assembled too fast to surface as explicit recollections. Sometimes how-ever, even a classical technique such as the flashback brings out forkings in time thatchallenge our linear presuppositions. But why is a flashback needed to disclose a forkin the past? “The answer is simple: the forking points are often so imperceptible thatthey cannot be revealed until after their occurrence, to an attentive memory. It is astory that can be told only in the past.”29

Deleuze also presses beyond this point. He seeks to make con-tact with nonchronological “sheets of past” or “regions of time” from which forks intime emerge. These sheets precede and enable the movement image, but they areleft in the shadows by the activity of perception. Bergson himself brings us to thepoint where this region is touched, for he contends that before a virtual memory isselected to help compose a particular percept, a larger sheet of past must be assem-bled from which that selection can be drawn.

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What is a sheet of past? One shape it assumes is that of a rapidlymobilized set of virtual memories, assembled in nonchronological order from differ-ent periods in your life as, say, you encounter a disturbing situation. For example,you hear a man walking at a fast pace behind you on a dark city street. Virtual mem-ories from different events in your adulthood, childhood, and adolescence might bemobilized quickly to help organize your perception and operational response. Sinceit takes the form of a virtual sheet, the memory does not become a series of explicitrecollections. A virtual memory, again, has effects upon the present without takingthe shape of recollection. For, as we saw in chapter 2, conscious processing does notmove fast enough to meet the action dictates of everyday perception. Rather a sheetof time—of an indivisible pulse of duration—is formed as these layers of memoryenter into communication below the threshold of conscious recollection. The assem-bled sheet is virtual and nonchronological. A response is forged from this affectivelyimbued encounter between a virtual sheet of time, the present event, and a possiblefuture stretching before you. It may be innovative. Perhaps you walk into the middleof the street with studied casualness. Or yell a friendly greeting to someone up thestreet, even though you do not know that person.

Inventive thinking draws sustenance from such sheets of time,but it typically does so in settings less constrained by the requirements of actionthan the one sketched above. During thinking, as the imperious demands of action-oriented perception are relaxed, elements in a nonchronological region of time drift,slide, and bounce into communication with each other. The creative dimension ofthinking flows from this encounter between a nonchronological region of time, thefugitive present, and an uncertain future. Its compositional effect, Deleuze suggests inconcurrence with Ramachandran, is engendered by new pathways mapped into thebody and brain as new thinking becomes habituated.

The process of thinking might fruitfully be compared to the ex-perience of déjà vu. Déjà vu dwells between a memory that cannot be consolidatedand a perception that cannot be completed. It is not exactly a confused state, for thatwould imply that there is a solid perception waiting to emerge or a settled memoryready to find expression. But in déjà vu experiences neither possibility is present;that which triggers the beginning of each is insufficient to allow either to be com-pleted. Déjà vu is thus a real state of indiscernibility, irreducible to the states it re-sides between. It feels uncanny because it subsists between familiar modes of experi-ence. It is uncanny, first, because its irreducibility to perception or memory signifiesdarkly how insufficient these rough-and-ready distinctions are to the actual flow ofexperience and, second, because it illuminates something about the structure of both

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memory and perception easily left in the shadows. For a sheet of memory is calledup by a new encounter in the present, and an encounter cannot be organized into aperception until a sheet of virtual memory has been mobilized. A déjà vu experienceteaches us about both memory and perception because it assembles fragments nec-essary to each without being reducible to either.

Thinking has a comparable structure. It involves a synthesis inthe fugitive present between a past that is constructed and a future yet to be consol-idated. During thinking, diverse elements in a nonchronological sheet of past enterinto communication with each other and with the present in which they are set.Thinking thus occurs in a delicate zone between dreaming and action-oriented per-ception. It involves an internal “conversation,” with some of the voices involvedsubsisting below the threshold of conscious awareness. Since its constitutive elementscoexist in a relation of constitutive instability, it can easily lapse into boredom, dream-ing, or action. You might slide toward boredom as you resist the effort or anxiety in-volved to think something new. It is because thinking subsists within this fugitivezone that it sometimes generates forks of time through which new ideas, concepts,judgments, actions, and sensibilities are ushered into the future.

Deleuze does not make this comparison between thinking anddéjà vu, although I think it fits his image of thought. But he does embrace the imageof time noted above. He shares the reading of time advanced by Nietzsche andPrigogine. Neither cyclical nor linear conceptions of time capture the movement ofthinking. In thinking time is “out of joint,” for thinking draws upon nonchronolog-ical sheets of past, and it might be nudged in a new or novel direction from the en-counter between a sheet of nonchronological past and an uncertain future. Thinkingparticipates in the forking of time because it is suspended in a delicate zone betweenreminiscence, dreaming, boredom, and action.30 It is a fragile and vulnerable activityfor the same reasons.

Some films, Deleuze says, address the ubiquitous role that sheetsof past play in thinking. By attending to these films we gain new insight into howthinking works. I presented in chapter 2, with Deleuze’s prompting, an example onthe edge of this territory when I mapped a depth-of-field shot in Citizen Kane inwhich the young Kane frolics in the snow in the small, intense back of a shot withthree levels of depth. Deleuze himself points to a more complex instance in the samefilm. Here we view the past working within Susan’s life. Susan is Kane’s former lover,whose affair with him ended his gubernatorial campaign, who then became his wife,and who was thereafter pressed by him to pursue a disastrous career as an opera


singer. In one scene Susan is grieving Kane and regretting the course of her life,when Kane “bursts in through the door at the back . . . , tiny, while Susan is dying inthe shadow in mid-shot and the large mirror is seen in close up.” In this suicidescene elements from Susan’s past and present communicate back and forth. Thescene “directly forms a region of time, a region of past which is defined by opticalaspects of elements borrowed from interacting planes.”31 It is perhaps now time tolet Deleuze speak in his own voice about how Orson Welles and Alain Resnais linkdepth-of-field shots to dissonance between sound and visual image to foment an ex-perience of time that agitates thought. The films referred to are Kafka and Last Yearat Marienbad.

Welles’ success in relation to Kafka is that he was able to show how spatiallydistant and chronologically separate regions were in touch with each other,at the bottom of a limitless time which made them contiguous: this is whatdepth of field is used for, the areas which are the furthest apart are in directcontact in the background. . . .

This membrane which makes the inside and the outside present toeach other is called memory. If memory is the explicit theme of Resnais’swork, there is no reason to look for a latent content which would be moresubtle; it is better to evaluate the transformation that the notion of memoryis made to undergo. . . . For memory is clearly no longer the faculty of havingrecollections: it is the membrane which, in the most varied ways (continuity,but also discontinuity, envelopment, etc.) makes sheets of past and layers ofreality freely correspond, the first emanating from an inside which is alwaysalready there, the second arriving from an outside always to come, the twognawing at the present which is now only their encounter.32

Let us distinguish between thinking as an active process that es-sentially involves language but is not exhausted by it and thought as past thinkingstored in vocabularies, dispositions, and beliefs. The former cannot be without thelatter, but it is not entirely reducible to the latter. Does thinking involve free corre-spondences between nonchronological sheets of time, mobilized in the fugitive pres-ent, pointing toward an unsettled future? Does its creative potential expand as youcultivate techniques to extend the fragile zone of indiscernibility in which it moves?Does thinking also carry compositional power, participating in modifying old disposi-tions and forging new habits even as it expresses established habits and dispositions?Reflection upon the reflexive, expressive, inventive, and compositional powers ofthought enables us to resist the reduction of thinking to cognition alone.

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Thinking and Technique

Attention to relays among technique, memory, perception, and thinking in film drawsus toward corollary relays outside the celluloid world. How ubiquitous are tech-niques and rituals in broad daylight? Do they work upon affectively imbued, virtualmemories? Consider, for starters, Chuck Knoblauch, the journeyman second base-man for the New York Yankees. According to a piece in the sports pages of the New York Times, he repeats nine precise steps prior to every pitch. He sweeps hisright foot across the batter’s box, taps the right and then the left foot with the bat,places the bat between his legs, bends over and touches his leg, ankle, and knees,stands up again and undoes the Velcro strap of his right batting glove, does thesame thing with his left glove, raises the bat with his right hand, holds the bat verti-cally to get a close grip, and draws the bat down again as he steps into the battingbox. This is his unconscious batting ritual, repeated at least fifteen to twenty-twotimes every game over 188 games. Hitting a baseball thrown by a highly skilledpitcher is a most demanding athletic task. Knoblauch is never sure whether he willencounter a fast ball at ninety-five miles an hour, a sharp curveball breaking away atseventy-eight, a slider at eighty-two, or a change-up that spins like a fastball buttravels at sixty-eight miles per hour. Besides all that, he must “decide” in a fewnanoseconds whether the pitch is going to be a strike or ball. He thus concocts overtime a ritual that helps to clear his mind of extraneous matters while opening it torespond intelligently and subconsciously to a pitch traveling faster than the consciousmind thinks. Knoblauch’s techniques of the self, gathered into a ritual performance,enable him to sustain split-second attentiveness to whatever pitch comes his way. “Ireally don’t know exactly what I do because I am thinking about the pitch. . . . It’s allabout getting comfortable. It’s kind of a fidgeting routine while your mind is atwork.”33 Unfortunately, Knoblauch, an excellent athlete, has not succeeded to datein devising techniques to overcome his tendency to convert routine tosses to firstbase into wild throws.

What are the relations between technique and thinking? Andbetween both and performance? Is technique an occasional aid to thought? Or arethinking and technique bound so closely together that it is sometimes difficult to de-cide where one leaves off and the other begins? Let’s draw up a short list of everydaytechniques, both gross and subtle, by which thinking is altered in its direction, speed,intensity, or sensibility. To simplify, our examples for now will be those in which anindividual is the object of the technique, and in which the individual either appliesthe technique to him- or herself or agrees to have it applied by others.

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• You listen to Mozart while reading a philosophical text, inorder to relax your mind and sharpen its acuity of reception.

• You undergo surgery to increase the flow of blood to the brain,in the hopes of avoiding a stroke and/or improving the qualityof your thinking.

• You go for a slow run after having struggled with a paradox orquandary that perplexes you.

• You take Prozac or Valium to relax your nerves and improve themood in which your thinking occurs.

• You submit to a severe whipping in the hopes of resolving afeeling of guilt that will not subside.

• You expose yourself to an image that, against your consideredintention, has disturbed you in the past, while listening to themusic of the Talking Heads as you soak in the bathtub andimagine how mellow it would be to dive into crystal-blue wateroff a Caribbean beach.

• You underline passages in a text while reading it, and thenoutline the text you have just underlined, remembering as youdo how close the relation is between hand gesture and brainprocesses.

• You give in to a feeling of intense regret that you hadpreviously resisted.

• You concentrate your mind on a practical issue after havinggone through several of the activities listed above.

• You introduce full-spectrum lighting into your house duringthe winter to help lift yourself out of morose thoughts andpassive moods.

• You cultivate more expansive powers of reflection andpersuasion by giving talks in public settings. On some suchoccasions you express in public one or two views you havepreviously stated only in the shower.

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• You watch TV ads and films in a new way, analyzing thetechniques through which they organize affect and mobilizevirtual memory, doing so both to give you more leverage inresponding to them and to teach you about how to applysimilar techniques to yourself when an old habit or tiredpattern of thought needs to be jolted.

• You reach a conclusion after reconsidering familiar argumentsand evidence in a mood that has shifted significantly from thelast time you engaged the issue.

• You read a book by Spinoza to sharpen your powers ofargument and subject entrenched presumptions aboutmind/body dualism to shock therapy, and then you read Proustto sharpen your powers of perception and memory.

• You introduce the phrase nontheistic gratitude into discussionswith secularists and believers, knowing that it will sound like anoxymoron to many. You hope, nonetheless, that its introductionwill, first, call attention to the forgotten history of its uses;second, open up cultural space in which to articulate an ethicalperspective reducible to neither secularism nor monotheism;and third, inspire new strategies by which to work on the lowerlayers of your intrasubjectivity to bring it closer to the faith youprofess.34

• You drink three glasses of wine at a social occasion to stopyourself from thinking obsessively about the same topic, orabout anything in particular.

• You focus on some new adventure of thought just before goingto sleep, in the hope that the dream work done that night willopen up new possibilities of thinking in the morning.

• You meditate at the same time every day, striving to loosen thehold the grasping mind has on the self and to open the self toside perceptions that slip away when the first temper prevails.

• You misrepresent a religious or metaphysical perspective thattroubles you, to relieve the feeling of disturbance it generates.

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• You go dancing to music that inspires and energizes you afterhearing very disappointing news.

• You minimize encounters for a time with associates whosedispositions are saturated with existential rage or resentment.

Such examples could be modified along several dimensions andproliferated indefinitely, for technique, in film, institutional life, and everyday life, isubiquitous. The relays that connect word, gesture, dream, memory, sound, rhythm,mobility, image, and thinking in the application of techniques are particularly close.You could include examples in which others apply tactics to you with or withoutyour awareness, and in which some of these tactics, and more punitive ones besides,are folded into institutional practices. Or you could form a community of, say, im-manent naturalists connected by print, phone, Internet, conferences, readings, andtravel, the members of which fold several such tactics into their associational activi-ties. Such a formation, indeed, would adapt to the conditions of late-modern life thegarden community through which Epicureans responded in their day to the hege-mony of polytheism.

But the list assembled above may already be suggestive aboutentanglements among thinking, virtual memory, technique, habit, mood, and sensi-bility. It is hard to locate an instance in which several elements are not touched, al-though the differentials vary. Should we, then, defer the temptation to reduce thesediverse interventions entirely to familiar categories, calling, say, one set internal tothought and another external to it? Or to reduce one set of activities entirely to lin-guistic expressions and another to technical interventions? What about the differencebetween invoking the idea of nontheistic gratitude to express an orientation to lifeand doing so to help compose that orientation? How radical is the difference betweenconcentrating your mind and taking Prozac to clear it of depressive thoughts? Doesthe presumption that the difference is one of kind rather than degree tacitly invoke aconception of the supersensible itself open to contestation? What is the differencebetween smoking a cigarette while reading and underlining passages in a text whiledoing so? What about tapping into a sheet of virtual memory while dreaming orwhile running, doing so each time in a way that unlocks a puzzle with which you hadbeen struggling? Or, again, at what point does listening to Mozart while you writeshift from hovering in the background of your work to becoming an element in itsrhythm and color?

Why press the connection between thinking and technique? Be-cause it discloses something about thinking that might otherwise remain obscure.

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Thinking is not merely involved in knowing, explaining, representing, evaluating,and judging. Subsisting within these activities are the inventive and compositionaldimensions of thinking. To think is to move something. And to modify a pattern ofbody/brain connections helps to draw a habit, a disposition to judgment, or a capac-ity of action into being. Thinking not only expresses our identities; it participates incomposing, strengthening, and modifying them. The cognitive — that is, the repre-sentational and explanatory — dimension of thinking coexists with its expressive,creative, and compositional functions. If, as Hampshire says, “it is precisely the pointof materialism to assert a much closer relation between processes of thought andphysical processes than is implied in most of the idioms of ordinary speech,”35 it maybe a creative tactic of reflexive thought to delay placing this miscellany immediatelyor entirely under the authority of those idioms. For the idioms of ordinary speechmay remain too fettered to the logic of recognition, knowledge, and representationwhile philosophical reflection, brain research, cinema practice, and the acceleratedspeed of everyday life coalesce to call the sufficiency of that logic into question.

Immanent Naturalism and Ethics

An orientation to ethics growing out of immanent naturalism contains several ten-dencies, although different practitioners nudge them in specific directions. I willsketch a few of these tendencies, scavenging freely from giants in this tradition andinflecting them in the direction I support.

Immanent naturalists, as already indicated, do not ground ethicsin a transcendental command or an intrinsic juridical source. Messages flowing fromthe immanent field to the higher, slower, conceptually sophisticated brain regionsare often received as if they were lawlike commands or the products of apodicticrecognition. But such first-person experiences can be called into question — althoughperhaps not definitively disproved in the last instance — by investigations from athird-person perspective. Our foray into the neurophysiology of the human brain,for instance, is compatible with the speculation that the apodictic experience ofmorality as law recorded by Kant does not flow from the noumenal to the phenom-enal realm as he contended. It may flow, rather, from the infrasensible dictates of theamygdala into higher consciousness. If so, it may be wise to cultivate an orientationto ethics that draws its initial impetus from elsewhere, for the amygdala is implicatedin a larger brain system that triggers fear, anxiety, and resentment. Immanent natu-ralists pursue an orientation to ethics that resists entangling it from the outset in thesimplification and cruelty such a system foments. Such a speculation requires furtherexploration. It is pertinent to note, however, that this speculation has also been sup-

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ported in a more intuitive way by other immanent naturalists who resist the moralityof law. Spinoza, Nietzsche, Freud, Hampshire, and Deleuze all link the morality oflaw to simplification, cruelty, and violence; and several of these figures strive to sup-plant it with more positive sources of ethical inspiration. They may be onto something.

With the translation of the transcendental into the immanent,you revise some questions of ethics given priority in the transcendental and quasi-transcendental traditions. You shift priority from the question “Why should I bemoral?” or “What is the transcendental or contractual basis of morality?” or “Whatis the subjective capacity presupposed by the practice of morality?” to “How do youcultivate presumptive responsiveness and generosity in a pluralistic culture?” For thepractices of obligation, responsibility, and justice one affirms are closely bound upwith the sensibility one brings to them. And one can strengthen or modify a sensi-bility, to some uncertain degree, by working tactically upon the infrasensible registerin which it is set.

One possibility to pursue is the cultivation of nontheistic grati-tude for the rich abundance of being amid the suffering that comes with being mor-tal. Such an orientation certainly cannot provide ethical inspiration for everyone. Itis, rather, one among several contestable existential faiths from which a positiveethos of engagement might be negotiated between interdependent partisans in apluralist culture. It is apt to be compelling to those informed by the following expe-riences: they find intellectualist readings of life to be insufficient to the texture of ex-istence; they experience in conjunction with others religious energies and attach-ments; they find it to be unconvincing or unacceptable to attach those energies tothe idea of a divine being; and they invest those energies in attachment to the earthor reverence for the protean diversity of being. Such an existential combinationpulls you away from teleological, Kantian, and secular models of morality. It opensthe gate to another possibility.

It is pertinent to emphasize again that immanent naturalists donot reduce ethical sources to “inclination” or “preference,” as neo-Kantians oftensuggest.36 That is merely how the attachments appear after they have been trans-lated into the confined categorical space Kantians and neo-Kantians reserve for sen-sibility. Such a representation tells you more about their assumptions than aboutours. But what, more closely, is the highest source to which immanent naturalistsmight appeal for inspiration? For Spinoza that source seems to be the existential joythat accompanies enhanced knowledge of the deep structure of things. But sinceother immanent naturalists build more contingency and fluidity into the world, suchan inspiration is not available to them, at least not in the form espoused by Spinoza.

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For many, a presumptive ethos of generosity is inspired by visceral “gratitude for theabundance of life” or “attachment to the world” or “care for being” or (in the case ofDeleuze) “belief in this world” already operative to some degree in the identities andinterests of people who have a modest degree of good fortune in life.37 That is, agenerous and responsive sensibility is not commanded into being in the first in-stance; it subsists, when individuals and groups are lucky, as a fugitive disposition onthe visceral register susceptible to further cultivation. The element of tragedy inethical life, according to Epicurus, Nietzsche, and Deleuze, is that such an elementalreverence for life is not always there in everyone, or actively suffused throughout aculture; when it is weak or absent, there is no transcendental guarantee that it can bekindled. The ethical life does not come equipped with a prior guarantee that the en-ergies available for its mobilization will be sufficient to the needs of the time. EvenKant was compelled to admit this point, when he encountered within his own moralphilosophy a “perversity” in the will that often exceeds the power of the “autono-mous” individual to rise above it.38

Immanent naturalists who pursue an ethic of cultivation developthree interconnected strategies to spiritualize positive possibilities on the immanentfield. First, we bring other traditions of ethics into contact with sore spots and pointsof comparative contestability in their claims to uncover solid foundations and/ortranscendental sources, doing so to show that the paradoxes and contestability weacknowledge in our ethico-political perspective find corollary points of contact intheir own. These genealogical encounters are thus important: they help to qualifyand render more modest the automatic stance of superiority through which manytranscendentalists and thick universalists respond to perspectives anchored in sensi-ble and infrasensible sources. We will engage one such perspective in the last chap-ter. Second, we devise techniques and exercises to diminish existential resentmentagainst the absence of such guarantees in the world, for we suspect that visceral re-sentment of the absence of final guarantees promotes a punitive orientation to dif-ference in many, blunts the capacity to nourish agonistic respect between interdepen-dent constituencies, and diminishes critical responsiveness to new movements ofcultural diversification. Third, we cultivate further that preliminary gratitude for theabundance of being already there, in the interests of folding more modesty and re-ceptive generosity into entrenched presumptions, established interests, and opera-tional codes. These are not the only strategies available, but this set does enter intoselective correspondence with the Buddhist strategies summarized by Francisco Varelain his reconstitution of cognitive theory and ethical practice.39 That is, it makescontact with a non-Western tradition that plays up the significance of the immanent

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register to ethical life and plays down the juridical element prominent in severalChristian and secular perspectives in Western philosophy.

The most distinctive contribution immanent naturalism makes tocontemporary ethical thought is through the retrieval of “self-artistry” (Nietzsche),“tactics of the self” (Foucault), “techniques” (Hampshire), and “micropolitics”(Deleuze). That retrieval connects an ethic of cultivation set in a philosophy of im-manence to the monotheistic traditions along one dimension, even as it diverges fromthem along another. Thus, as Talal Asad has shown in his exploration of medievalChristianity, several monastic orders perfected exercises to cultivate “aptitudes ofperformance” appropriate to their faith below the register of belief.40 The role ofarts of the self, however, is demoted in Kant’s rewriting of Christian morality, althoughKant does allow “gymnastics” a modest role in preparing the inclinations to acceptthe moral law. Contemporary secular, neo-Kantian theories, with their inordinateconfidence in argument and deliberation, pretty much jettison this dimension ofethical life.

The exploration in the two previous sections of connections be-tween thinking and technique also makes technique the hinge that links thought (ascorporeally stored thinking) to ethical sensibility. In a world in which institutionaldiscipline has become extensive and intensive, such tactics can function as counter-measures to build more independence and thoughtful responsiveness into ethico-political sensibilities. You might, thus, act tactically and experimentally upon yourselfto fold more presumptive receptivity and forbearance into your responses to plural-izing movements in the domains of gender, sensual affiliation, ethnic identification,religion/irreligion, or market rationality that challenge your visceral presumption toembody the universal standard against which that diversity is to be measured.

An ethical sensibility, you might say, is composed through thecultural layering of affect into the materiality of thought. It is a constellation ofthought-imbued intensities and feelings. To work on an established sensibility bytactical means, then, is to nudge the composition of some layers in relation to others.You work experimentally on the relays between thought-imbued intensities below thelevel of feeling and linguistic complexity, thought-imbued feelings below the level oflinguistic sophistication, images that trigger responses at both levels, and linguisticallysophisticated patterns of narrative, argument, and judgment. You do so to encourage theeffects of action upon one register to filter into the experience and imagination avail-able on others, thereby working tactically upon a dense sensibility whose layered com-position is partly receptive to direct argument and deliberation, partly receptive totactics that extend beyond the reach of argument, and partly resistant to both.

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To foreground arts of the self, then, is to flag the insufficiency ofargument to ethical life without denying its pertinence. Michel Foucault suggeststhe significance of such relays when he says, “It is not enough to say the subject isconstituted in a symbolic system. . . . It is [also] constituted in real practices. . . . Thereis a technology of the constitution of the self which cuts across symbolic systemswhile using them.”41 The thoughtful application by oneself of techniques to one’sentrenched patterns of affective thought can both track the institutional technolo-gies through which the visceral register has been organized and activate presumptiveresponsiveness to new social movements of pluralization. You allow effects promotedat one level to filter into others, doing so to enable new thoughts to come into beingor to refine the sensibility in which your judgments have heretofore been set. Forthinking, memory, sensibility, and judgment are interwoven.

Ethics and Micropolitics

You can think of micropolitics, in the Deleuzian sense, as a cultural collectivizationand politicization of arts of the self. Micropolitics applies tactics to multiple layers ofintersubjective being. Because it is often practiced in competitive settings, it con-tains an agonistic element. The assemblage to which such micropolitical tactics areapplied might be a small group, a large constituency, or an interdependent constel-lation of people holding divergent positions on issues in need of general resolution.Arts of the self and micropolitics are ubiquitous in cultural life, even though theyalso stand in a relation of torsion to each other.

In a fast-paced world you might try to step out of the cauldronof micropolitics from time to time to work on the ethical sensibility you bring toit.42 Such a retreat can never be entirely successful in a modern world of intensiveinstitutional discipline, but the effort still makes a difference. That is when arts ofthe self become particularly pivotal. But it also becomes advisable to step back intothe cauldron periodically to enable the sensibility you have cultivated to exert alarger influence, or, sometimes, to compel it to encounter new challenges and pres-sures. With this proviso in mind about the torsion between arts of the self and mi-cropolitics, we turn to micropolitics.

Over the past fifteen years in the United States numerous trialsand hearings have captivated the country. Think of the Pamela Smart trial, the Borkhearings, the Thomas/Hill hearings, the Menendez brothers trials, the Bobbitt wifeabuse and penis-severing case, the O. J. Simpson trial, the Clinton show trial, andadd to each countless hours of neighborhood gossip, news programs, films, and TVtalk shows devoted to them. Barely three months can pass without one trial or hear-


ing assuming the media spotlight just vacated by another. These are vintage eventsof micropolitics. Their choreography affects us on several intercoded registers ofbeing. Consider, for instance, the TV choreography of the Robert Bork confirma-tion hearings in the Senate.

Whatever the seeming naturalness of Senators Kennedy and Biden, they hadbeen carefully rehearsed backstage, with the Harvard law professor LawrenceTribe. Rehearsals covered not only the appropriate questions to ask but alsomatters of demeanor and legal bearing. . . . The front stage of the hearingwas that portion of the Senate caucus room that could be or, better, was al-lowed to be taken in by the camera. That consisted of the table at which RobertBork and subsequent witnesses sat; the curved, empaneled, and continuousdesk or dais at which fourteen senators sat; and the bay which separated them.The only leakage into the stage were glimpses of the audience, usually Bork’sfamily, seated immediately behind the witness, and, behind the senators,their aides listening to the proceedings, moving about, whispering into theear of their chief or passing documents to the dais. The rest of the back re-gion . . . was kept from view. At solemn moments the area behind the sena-tors was cleared to minimize distraction and to heighten the dignity of theproceedings; for example, Senator Biden’s opening speech . . . was kept clearof temporal and spatial intrusions. The stage itself was kept free of any ac-tion that might contradict the image of rectitude, control and jurisprudentialdignity, that might contradict the impression being fostered.43

Stage management, a solemnized setting, images of impartial de-meanor, carefully crafted correlations between speech and gesture — all mobilized toorganize the affective element of intersubjectivity. In this hearing, and numerousothers as well, the audience was sharply divided over the guilt or innocence of theparties involved and the motives of those in charge of the proceedings. But suchhearings affect the audience at multiple levels of being. The perpetual repetition ofsuch legal and quasi-legal events reflects and promotes a sea change in the politicalculture, insinuating general effects below the threshold of explicit partisan opinion.It first activates a vague sense of anxiety already in circulation about the moral shapeof politics at the onset of the twenty-first century. It then mobilizes that anxiety togive cultural priority to the juridical dimension of political life. For instance, as thepolitical culture becomes more oriented to the search for guilty and innocent partiesand becomes more accusatory in character, the implicit presumption to authority ofthe Supreme Court is elevated and extended.

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The micropolitics of juridicalization, finding expression in neigh-borhood gossip, recurrent show trials, national talk shows, and electoral campaigns,slips into the background of macropolitical life. But the micropolitics of cultural ju-ridicalization sets presumptive agendas for macropolitics, ruling a variety of issuesand presumptions out of public life. In a setting where unemployment, family life,welfare, drug use, and electoral participation have been moralized, criminalized, orboth, it becomes difficult to generate debates about market sources of income inequal-ity or the effects of job insecurity upon crime.

Or take another example, more favorable to the political perspec-tive endorsed here. With the introduction of MIRV (multiple individually targetedreentry vehicle systems) in the 1970s, the old balance of terror between the SovietUnion and the United States was thrown into jeopardy. Between 1979 and 1989 (be-fore the collapse of the Soviet Union) a significant transformation occurred in theoperational presumptions about the arms race in both countries. Micropolitics playeda significant role in this shift, operating below the veneer of legislative action andmilitary policy. Here, myriad discussions at dinner tables, in churches, and in class-rooms activated a gut sense of urgency in many people. Television and the other me-dia eventually picked up on this glacial shift of mood, creating a favorable setting forthe Reagan-Gorbachev negotiations and limiting the ability of the Right to mobilizefear against them.

Indeed, each time a new advance is made in the domains of ecol-ogy, race relations, income distribution, worker rights, gay rights, religious freedom,and gender diversity it is supported and enabled by micropolitical actions that createresonances across several constituencies at multiple levels of being. Images of a deadfetus flashed to those assessing the legality of abortion; television shows presentinggays as more than cartoon figures in a heterosexual culture; a film about a persondying an agonizing death in a world where doctor-assisted suicide remains illegal;talk-show repetitions of the conviction that you can’t be moral or participate respon-sibly in public culture unless you believe in a God — these examples are merely thesteam pouring out of the micropolitical kettle of late-modern life.

Micropolitics is ubiquitous. Immanent naturalism makes a timelycontribution to contemporary politics, then, through its appreciation of how mi-cropolitics persistently invades and pervades macropolitics, and through its corollaryattentiveness to the connection between techniques of the self and micropolitics.

Several secular conceptions of morality, while some of them tooare committed to plurality, underplay the ubiquity and significance of tactics of theself and micropolitics to the texture of public life. They may do so because they invest

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the deliberative dimension of politics with more autonomy, sufficiency, and purity thanit can muster. Instead of thinking about which modes of micropolitics to practice andwhich to resist, they act as if the micropolitical dimension of life could be expelledaltogether. Nothing could be more futile. Immanent naturalists, by comparison, em-phasize the complex interactions among sounds, smells, images, rhythms, and concep-tually refined deliberation in the ethos of public life. Most of us are pluralists whosupport micropolitical strategies to contest the ugliest dimensions of the culture wars.

It is crucial to emphasize that the sensibility pursued here cannotbe generated by the intellectual resources of immanent naturalism alone. The intel-lectual resources of that philosophy must be linked to other strategies to overcomeexistential resentment against the limits it acknowledges and to cultivate the sensi-bility it endorses. That is, it takes a coalescence of a preliminary attachment to theabundance of this world, a philosophy that expresses that attachment, and artfultechniques that support these first two movements to entrench this ethical perspec-tive. Some moral theorists, predictably, will criticize this result by saying, “But youhave not shown us why we must accept the moral philosophy you endorse, merelythat you do endorse it.” But this response already buries the fundamental issue, for onthe view advanced here intellectualism is constitutively insufficient to ethics, and no finalmoral source to date has ever been vindicated so consummately that all reasonable people findthemselves commanded by intellect or revelation to accept it. This is the point at whichimmanent naturalists and several religions of the Book converge in breaking withthe philosophical imperatives advanced by secular theories: articulation of an ethicrequires aid and support from a corresponding sensibility to actualize itself. No eth-ical perspective, at least to date, sustains itself by argument alone. The sensibilityembraced here might be set in a theistic faith or in nontheistic gratitude for being.But there is a strong case to be made that neither it nor its competitors are reducibleto argument alone, as even Kant was compelled to acknowledge, and, similarly, thatnone can generate resources of faith that must command the assent of all. To de-mand, as many persistently do, that other perspectives establish an authoritative ba-sis commanding universal assent when the carriers of such a demand cannot measureup to that standard themselves is to foster nihilism and cynicism in ethical life per se.

My assumption is that advocates of other theo-ontological per-spectives can cultivate similar or complementary sensibilities, proceeding from dif-ferent existential faiths. Indeed, when devotees of different perspectives reciprocallyacknowledge the comparative contestability of the source each honors and also workreciprocally to overcome existential resentment against this persistent condition ofbeing, the prospect of cultivating agonistic respect across difference improves. These

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are alliances to forge across a pathos of distance. By emphasizing the legitimate con-testability of the presumptions we honor most in the eyes of others and the insuffi-ciency of argument to ethics, immanent naturalists open lines of communication totheists and secularists prepared to make similar acknowledgments. These lines ofconnection are strengthened by our efforts to rewrite (rather than simply to reject)the transcendental field endorsed by others, and by our positive orientation to rela-tional arts of the self and micropolitics.

The Fecundity of Thinking

The affective dimension of thought; its multilayered character; contingent encoun-ters in thinking among sheets of past, the fugitive present, and an uncertain future;techniques of thought; the creativity of thought; the compositional power of thought.What about thought, then? A contemporary immanent naturalist, aided and instructedby developments in brain research and film technique, can say a fair amount aboutthe geology of thinking. You can show how thinking participates in several layers of be-ing and in every aspect of ethical and political life, including the formation of newidentities out of old energies and injuries and the cultivation of critical responsive-ness to new events and constituencies. You might eventually outline how each layercontains distinctive speeds, capacities, and intensities that affect the intra- and inter-subjective relations of thought; how affective intensities of proto-judgment sometimessurge up from the lower strata, flooding slower and more refined layers of concep-tual thought and conscious imagination, overwhelming them for a time or propellingthem down new paths of exploration; how these movements sometimes throw thoughtinto a tailspin or open up possibilities of invention for an individual, group, or con-stituency; and how those lines of flight, in turn, pose questions about what tactics todeploy to educate thought-imbued habits below direct reflective regulation.

To say all that is to speak to the body/brain/culture network inwhich thought is set, but it still does not dig deeply into the soil from which think-ing emerges. There may still be one more zone of passage to address. If thinking en-compasses ideas in movement, and if what might be called “the unthought” consistsof energetic assemblages that are non- or minimally ideational, then thinking drawspart of its material and energy from the unthought as that which does not itself takethe form of thought. The fecundity of thinking is bound up with these fugitive pas-sages from unthought to thought, passages that leave signs and remainders but arenot themselves susceptible to representation. We here merely allude to such a mag-ical zone, recalling how it was suggested by our exploration of the mixing of nature,affect, and culture in chapter 3.

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The factors reviewed in the preceding two paragraphs make itunwise to anticipate a future in which the activity of thinking will be encompassedby lawlike explanations. The “immanence” in the naturalism affirmed here expressesa constitutive element of wildness in thinking. This element, bound to the play ofaffect within and across registers, is marked by danger, but it also provides a matrixthrough which something new and wonderful can sometimes surge into being. Artsof the self and micropolitics, when informed by visceral gratitude for the abundanceof being, can aid those who must decide which new infusions to support, which totolerate, and which to resist. For when such context-bending conditions arise, exist-ing rules, constitutions, identities, and principles do not suffice to govern judgment.

Creative thinking may be particularly important to nurture dur-ing a time when the tempo of life moves faster than heretofore, when many individ-uals, constituencies, and states are therefore confronted more often with surprisingevents that disrupt the sufficiency of established codes of identity, principle, proce-dure, or judgment. Attention to the layered character of thinking, the inventive po-tential in it, its compositional character, and the pertinence of technique to it may beparticularly appropriate to a fast-paced time in which the established boundaries ofnormality and morality periodically need to be modified, amended, or reinterpreted.Negotiation of an ethos of presumptive generosity is important during a time whenthe forking of time and sedimented codes clash. Because creative thinking is so impor-tant to contemporary life, freedom of thought and expression — already supportedloquaciously by Epicurus, Lucretius, Spinoza, Hampshire, Foucault, and Deleuze —emerge as central principles to embrace in the contemporary period. Most of theabove-mentioned figures participate in the contestable faith that as freedom of ex-pression becomes generalized it becomes somewhat easier to thicken a series of frag-ile connections between thinking, freedom, care of the self, and care for the world.Such connections are often susceptible to disruption. But negotiation of a generousethos of engagement in a diverse society moving at a faster tempo than heretoforedepends upon them.

Thinking is periodically inspired or jolted by unexpected encoun-ters that jar it into motion out of stupor or call into question chunks in the conven-tional storehouse of thought. Forks in thinking affect, as they become consolidated,the sensibility through which you act. And micropolitical interventions into collec-tive sensibilities installed at several layers of being can make a notable difference tothe ethos of public life.

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F I V E

The Variety of Religious Experience

it seems simple. Because life is riddled with mystery and uncertainty, an existen-tial faith may encounter paradoxes that call its claim to universality into question. Soa dictum becomes tempting: wherever mystery and freedom meet, a variety of faithsbubble up; wherever, therefore, people prize freedom they will support a significantpresumption in favor of honoring that variety. Many give preliminary consent tosuch a dictum. But it quickly runs into difficulties. Christians have often insisted thatbecause their faith is universal it must be sanctioned by public ethics in the states orcivilizations they inhabit. Secularists, while praising religious diversity in privatelife, typically sanctify this or that rendering of public reason, deliberation, justice, orprocedure as the one practice that must be taken to rise above faith. They often failto acknowledge the element of faith in their doctrine. Freudians, who expose primalelements of dogmatism in the historical religions of Judaism and Christianity, oftenenough act as if the interpretation that addresses that dogmatism itself rises abovefundamental contestability. And numerous defenders of freedom in the United Statesinsist that the very survival of freedom requires general loyalty to the “Judeo-Christiantradition” that enables it. Qualifications and self-exemptions abound, then.

It is difficult to see how such an effect could be avoided entirelyby a party enlivened by the faith that animates it. For faith, by its very nature, inclines

Memory Traces, Mystical States, and

Deep Pluralism

toward dogmatism. The dictum to support a variety of faiths is thus haunted by ashadow of self-referential exemption that cannot be eliminated entirely. But perhapsit can be worked upon modestly. This very condition of possibility for the dictumnot only sets limits to it; commitment to it conveys a responsibility to assess and re-assess the specificity of those limits as time flies by. This responsibility is increasedby our knowledge of how a tropical undergrowth of limits and exemptions thriveswithin a habitual practice of pluralism, making it hard for new plants to find a placein the sun. Today the need for reassessment of the limits is accentuated by the acceler-ation of speed in so many domains of life, by concomitant drives to the pluralizationof faith in and across several territorial states, and by fundamentalist reactions tothese two developments. There is a growing sense that the historical modus vivendiof secularism carved out of Christendom in a few Western states is no longer ade-quate to the contemporary demands placed upon it.

Rereading Moses

Sigmund Freud reassessed the animating energies of Judaism and Christianity underdistinctive circumstances — in a situation, you might say, of triple urgency. He wasdying of cancer, he had been under the fragile protection of a Catholic Church thatmight turn against him at any moment because of his critical interpretation of mono-theism, and he had just fled Vienna in the face of the imminent arrival of troops fromNazi Germany. In these circumstances Freud speaks of the role imagination plays instaging the sweeping historical narratives in which European civilization is set:

Remote times have a great attraction — sometimes mysteriously so — for theimagination. As often as mankind is dissatisfied with its present — and thathappens often enough — it harks back to the past and hopes at last to win be-lief in the never forgotten dream of a Golden Age. Probably man still standsunder the magic spell of his childhood, which a not unbiased memory pre-sents to him as a time of unalloyed bliss. Incomplete and dim memories ofthe past, which we call tradition, are a great incentive to the artist, for he isfree to fill in the gaps in the memories according to the behest of his imagi-nation and to form after his own purpose the image of the time he has un-dertaken to reproduce. One might almost say that the more shadowy tradi-tion has become the more meet is it for the poet’s use.1

Freud refers specifically to the role imagination plays in the Jew-ish story of Exodus and the Pauline story of resurrection and original sin. Moses andPaul are critical to the history he reviews. But it may be reasonable to assume that

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the statement also speaks to his own role as a countermythologist. For Freud finds itimperative to rethink the archaic origins of Judaism and Christianity during a timewhen anti-Semitism threatens the very existence of Jews in Europe. He exercises hispsychoanalytic imagination upon two discrepant, interlaced stories to see what newpossibilities might be squeezed out of them.

The Freudian counterstory is familiar in broad outline. Judaism,a faith grounded in “the law of the father,” was founded by Moses, an Egyptian princewith a stammer occasioned by the imperative to speak to the wandering “tribe” in atongue foreign to him. Moses enforced the alien religion of a universal God, whoseimage was not to be shown, upon a people who practiced idol worship before his in-tervention, and who reverted to a volcano god, Jahve, after his death — “an uncannydemon who walks by night and shuns the light of day.”2 Moses used the opportunitythe fleeing Israelites provided to inculcate into the Jews the faith his father, PharaohIkhanaton, had tried to install into the Egyptian people in the fourteenth centuryb.c.e. That faith, as Egyptologist Jan Assmann confirms through evidence unavailableto Freud, insisted that magical rites were superstitions, that other gods were false,and that its God, as stated in the hymn to it, was “the sole God beside whom there isnone.”3 The introduction of circumcision, imported from Egypt, both sanctifiesconversion to a new faith and carries forward the fragmentary memory of those fa-thers who enforced celibacy among tribal sons in archaic times. Resenting his im-placable rule, however, the tribe eventually killed Moses and covered up its deed.The experience of guilt in that execution is compounded by the “memory traces” itactivates of the primal killing by sons of patriarchs in prehistoric times who held amonopoly of sexual rights over women.

Freud’s story, as reviewed so far, reflects an interplay betweenhistorical evidence and the assumptions of psychoanalytic theory. But why does Freudnot just tell a counterstory without attaching those historical hooks? He may thinkhe must do so to counter the power of the official story. In that story, Moses is a He-brew boy floated down the river in a basket by his mother to save his life; he is thenpicked up by a pharoah’s daughter and then returns to his people as an adult to savethem. The traditional story is supported by historical evidence filtered through thetexts and assumptions of Judaic faith. It may, then, take a counterstory with historicalhooks of its own to disturb and jostle the hold of the official story. And Freud thinksit is essential to disrupt the official story. Moreover, even some nonbelieving Jews(and Christians in turn) may turn out to be more committed to the historicity of theofficial Moses than they had imagined, once confronted with a Moses said to beEgyptian. Freud may think that he can accomplish the critical effect he seeks only by

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interpreting available historical evidence through the lens of psychoanalytic theory,rather than merely reconstructing the story from the resources of the latter alone.He is working on collective memory supported by a sacred text, rather than trying todevelop a historical account separate from that memory; but included in the collectivememory he probes is a set of assumptions about correspondences between the memoryand facts of history that legitimate it. It is this combination that makes it so shockingto say, “Moses was an Egyptian.” For what it’s worth — and I don’t claim it is worth thatmuch — I suspect that if you could suspend the assumptions and hopes of both be-lievers and Freud, Freud’s story would turn out to contain about as much historicaldoubt and credibility as the one he contests. But again, it is because he purports tohook onto history filtered through the truths of psychoanalysis that the Freudian ac-count is disturbing. This disturbance itself may reveal the extent to which many, atone level or another, invest the traditional story with historical credibility.4

But why is it so important for Freud to revise the story in a waythat disturbs supporters of the official version? Let us continue with the countermyth.Centuries after its founder’s death, the Mosaic faith returns with new vigor to a peo-ple whose prophets had never let it die entirely. It is a more intellectual and ethicalreligion than those preceding it, partly because of its refusal to picture or name thedeity and partly because of its resistance to the magical rites of paganism. But the re-turn of the Mosaic monotheistic, universal god is marred. The Jews, expressingdarkly the source of their faith in a foreigner and the guilt of their ancestors inkilling the foreign founder, define themselves to be the “chosen people” of the uni-versal god. Here is what Freud says at this juncture:

Still more astonishing is the conception of a god suddenly “choosing” a peo-ple, making it “his” people and himself its own god. I believe it is the onlycase in the history of human religions. . . . Sometimes, it is true, we hear of apeople adopting another god, but never of a god choosing a new people.Perhaps we approach an understanding of this unique happening when wereflect on the connection between Moses and the Jewish people. Moses hadstooped to the Jews, had made them his people; they were his “chosen people.”

Or again:

He retained the character of a universal god who reigned over all lands andpeople; the fact, however, that his worship had passed from the Egyptians tothe Jews found its expression in the added doctrine that the Jews were hischosen people, whose special obligation would in the end find their specialreward.5

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It now becomes clear why Freud presses the idea that the founderof Judaism was a great stranger, an Egyptian. He not only seeks to underline thesyncretic origins of religions that take themselves to be unique and pure, he hopesthat his revision in the late 1930s of the story of Exodus will encourage Jews to giveup the definition of themselves as the chosen people. To redefine that aspect of thefaith would be to subtract from Judaism an element that has historically incitedmany Christians to anti-Semitism. Freud is willing to risk the ugly label “self-hatingJew” to challenge one characteristic of a faith from which he otherwise draws somuch sustenance. “It is honor enough for the Jewish people that it has kept alivesuch a tradition and produced men who lent it their voice, even if the stimulus hadfirst come from outside, from a great stranger.”6

It is one thing to risk disfavor from the bearers of a faith withwhich you identify, another to criticize the Catholic Christianity professed by themajority of people in your host country during the early stages of the Nazi Holocaust.Freud feared that his protection by the Catholic Church in Austria would be relin-quished if he published his findings there; the new Moses risked becoming a newvoice in the wilderness when he did publish them in 1939 while living in England.

Nonetheless, he proceeds politely and steadily. Pauline Christian-ity, he argues, is infiltrated by pagan elements, through, for example, the prolifera-tion of divine images, the paradoxical pluralization of divinity in the Trinity, and theveiled reintroduction of a mother goddess in Mary. Pauline Christianity is also an-chored in a triple accusation against Jews. First “they” are charged with exposingJesus to crucifixion. Second, partly because Judaism provided the preliminary mate-rials from which Christian monotheism was crafted, Jews are singled out as a partic-ularly obstinate people, too proud to convert to the universal faith launched in theirmidst. And third, Jews are implicitly charged with denying the basis of their own faithin the killing of its founder, while Pauline Christians acknowledge the sacrifice ofChrist for them and, through Paul’s remarkable doctrine of original sin, darkly touchthe archaic past, when the sons killed the implacable patriarch governing the clan.The sacrifice of Jesus allows Christianity to become a “Son religion” and opensChristians to the probability of intense resentment against the presence of the “Father religion” on the lands they control.7 But the basic energy of anti-Semitismcan be summarized in the following dictum: Too many northern Europeans, con-verted as late as the Middle Ages from paganism to Christianity, resent the pious de-mands and salvational uncertainties of the new faith they explicitly affirm. It is toounnerving to express that resentment against the authorities that be or, even worse,against the Christian God they depend upon for salvation. So it is projected upon

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the living bearers of that faith from which Christianity is derived, upon those who hadbeen habituated to some aspects of the new faith for centuries but were still too stub-born to bow before the very Christ who grew up in their midst. The Great Refusalof Jews is therefore not only resented actively, it is also envied secretly. Freud writes:

One might say they [the Christians] are all “badly christened”; under thethin veneer of Christianity they have remained what their ancestors were,barbarically polytheistic. They have not yet overcome their grudge againstthe new religion which was forced upon them, and they have projected itonto the source from which Christianity came to them. The fact that theGospels tell a story which is enacted among Jews, and in truth treats only ofJews, has facilitated such a projection. The hatred for Judaism is at bottomhatred for Christianity, and it is not surprising that in the German NationalSocialist revolution this close connection of the two monotheistic religionsfinds such clear expression in the hostile treatment of both.8

Let us set aside for later discussion Freud’s own citation of the“barbarically polytheistic” ancestors of Christianity. This remarkable paragraph con-denses the thematic upshot of Moses and Monotheism, even though — to my knowl-edge — that theme has not received nearly as much attention as the Freudian render-ing of the origins of Judaism. There is a soft line of repetition between Freud’s accountof the origins of Judaism, with its theme of the internal mobilization of resentmentagainst the foreign propagator, and his account of the relation between Christianityand the living representatives of the past from which it sprang. The Pauline found-ing of Christianity, after the death of Jesus, expresses an anti-Semitism that is bothdoctrinal and visceral — doctrinal in its resentment of the people who provide theinspirational materials from which the new faith is forged because of their very refusalto acknowledge the universal truth it so readily makes available to them, visceral inthat resentment by Christians themselves against the stringent demands and salva-tional insecurities of Christianity sets up this minority inside Europe but outsideChristianity to become explicit targets of that animus. What is to be done?

Memory Traces and Practical Exercises

Freud hopes his retelling of the Mosaic story will help to redefine an element in Ju-daism that foments prejudice against Jews. Perhaps he also hopes that Christian ac-tivists will pick up the cudgels from their side in the aftermath of the Holocaust, re-assessing elements within Christianity that foster anti-Semitism. Clearly, many havedone so in the interim between 1939 and today. Among the philosophically inclined

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I would single out Gerald Bruns, Fred Dallmayr, Karl Jaspers, Paul Ricoeur, ElainePagels, David Tracy, and Charles Taylor as particularly noble. The problem, though,is that Freud’s account of the ugly element within Pauline Christianity identifies afew elements so deeply rooted that it is difficult to see how work on the doctrinesand sensibilities of Christians (and Christian secularists) could reach them. To put thepoint differently, Freud’s thesis of the overdetermination of resentment in Christianitypictures a faith in a poor position to become forbearing and generous to those insideand outside the faith who call the universality of its doctrine into question. Since it isunlikely that psychoanalytic faith, which treats “the hypothesis” of monotheism ingeneral as delusional and compensatory, will become the operational faith of mostpeople, it remains pertinent to ask how Christianity could modify itself in the rele-vant respects. The risk of Moses and Monotheism is that its deep story line operates toentrench the phenomenon it seeks to overcome.

To probe that risk, I will focus on Freud’s account of “memorytraces,” paying particular attention to the putative role those alleged “traces” play inChristianity. My sense is that Freud is onto something important in his engagementwith traces but that his historical overdetermination of them may be susceptible torevision. A trace, let us say, is enough like a thought to affect linguistically sophisticatedthoughts and judgments, and not enough like a thought to be susceptible to directinspection. A trace is a memory fragment that does not take the form of an explicitrecollection. Because it is both fast in its arrival and fragmentary in its shape, it can-not be recollected in itself, even after psychoanalysis, although it can be interpretedthrough psychoanalysis. It becomes, however, marked by affective intensity once trig-gered by an appropriate event. It can thus be powerful in its efficacy in the present,even if not determinant enough to become a clear memory of the past. It is for thesevery reasons resistant to modification by direct intellectual or interpretive means alone,for it does not assume the shape of a linguistically sophisticated thought demarcatedthrough numerous relations of contrast and similarity to other ideas; nonetheless, itcan be fueled by intense energy.

The experience of trauma possesses some characteristics of a mem-ory trace. Years after a distressing battlefield experience, a sudden sound or unex-pected smell in some way associated with it can trigger a painful reenactment of thatexperience. The sound or smell activates a “trace” attached to other painful memo-ries. In a memory trace, the triggering mechanism touches something in the past notsusceptible in principle to conscious recollection, although imaginative stories ornarratives may touch it in uncanny ways. A triggering event may activate in an adulttraces from infancy, even before the individual had access to language. To take an

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example that Freud alludes to without amplifying, attendance at a bris by a man whowas himself circumcised may provoke intense but cognitively vague feelings fromthe past that infiltrate into the man’s contemporary conduct and identifications. Rit-uals of various sorts, practiced in conjunction with devoutly professed stories, mayactivate collective traces that would otherwise remain latent.

Freud inserts such traces not only into the early life of the childbut also into the early life of the species. He suggests, with a combination of intellectualhesitancy and experimental persistence, that all humans (females too?) carry tracesof guilt over the primordial killing of the father by sons who resented his sexual mo-nopoly and identified with his role. This memory is not the repression of a full-scaleevent that we could picture again if we brought it up for review. It is a trace in thataffectively imbued thought fragments of the event are deposited in the recesses of thebrain. The “archaic heritage of mankind,” says Freud, “includes not only dispositions,but also ideational contents, memory traces of the experiences of former genera-tions.”9 These traces became intensively reactivated by the deaths of Moses andJesus, respectively. They did so because of the similarity the more recent events bearto the primal events. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, for example, would perhapssay that the triggering events tap into the memory of the amygdala, an intense littlebrain nodule capable of sending, storing, and receiving only crude messages. Theamygdala registers traumatic events in a rough-and-ready way. It then both incitesimmediate action and sends out fast, intense signals to the slower, more refined brainregions for processing in a more complex way.10

Memory traces are, as it were, virtual. That is, they are real with-out being actual: they exert effects (hence are real) without themselves being refinedenough to be direct objects of existential inspection (hence lacking actuality). Thekilling of Jesus, for Freud, awakens the memory trace of the killing of Moses, andthe killing of Moses activates a trace of the primal killing. “The awakening . . . of thememory trace through a recent real repetition of the event is certainly of decisiveimportance. The murder of Moses was such a repetition and, later on, the supposedjudicial murder of Christ, so that these events move into the foreground as causativeagents.”11 The legacy of guilt and resentment Freud discerns in Christianity, then, isgrounded in the prehistory of religion in general as well as in the Pauline foundingof Christianity. It is because it is inscribed in that part of the psychic life not amenableto intellectual regulation alone that Freud is so wary of purely intellectual proposalsof reform.

Freud, therefore, is confident that his story — his attempt at in-tellectual reformation — will be implausible at first to most people. Implausible be-

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cause of the length of time it covers, because of its conflict with the official stories,because of its dependence upon a biological theory of inherited traces, because ofthe uncertain topography and weird trajectory of those traces carried across innu-merable generations, and because of the continued effects of the traces themselvesupon those who encounter the revised story. But he nonetheless thinks his storybrings out characteristic features of monotheism that otherwise remain inexplicable.He wants the new story to tap into memory traces that could never be uncovered di-rectly as explicit memories, and hence he knows that his story is not in principle sus-ceptible to definitive historical validation. But he seems to hope that his revisioncould eventually help to modify some of the destructive elements in, or potentialitiesof, monotheism. Perhaps he thinks that story tokens or story types become deeplyinscribed in our brains, so that we keep reiterating the same models even when theyare applied to secular materials. And perhaps he wonders whether those tokens them-selves could be modified.

I suspect that Freud’s idea of memory traces is partly on the righttrack, while his insistence on grounding them in primordial events is overplayed. Itis not that biological theory has definitively disproved the possibility Freud endorses.12

I doubt that it has done so definitively, despite what people say. And I concede thatFreud’s interpretation of the staying power of the Pauline doctrine of original sinresonates with his thesis. For he takes that doctrine to be powerful because it refersnot only to the fateful actions of Adam and Eve as interpreted by Paul, but also moredarkly to the primal killing of patriarchs who were later deified by their killers.Even recent experiments with rats could be taken to reopen slightly a door most ofus thought had been closed definitively. These are the rats that react with intensefear upon seeing a cat, even when they have never before seen a cat or been in thecompany of adult rats who manifest such fear. Nonetheless, I jump nervously off theFreudian bandwagon at this juncture, offering three interwoven rationalizations tovindicate a leap in midair before they were imagined. The first revolves around adoubt concerning whether and how such an intense trauma could be inherited acrossso many generations. The second revolves around the anthropological (and, as weshall see, Jamesian) idea that the variety of religious experience is less confined andmore diverse than Freud suggests. And the third revolves around an unwillingness tolend ammunition to the idea of race that may be implied by this speculative theoryof inheritance across innumerable generations. The idea, then, is to bracket Freud’spresumption of the inheritance of primordial memory traces without closing the doorto revisiting it. At the same time, I retain the idea of memory traces intersubjectivelycreated and layered into corporeo-cultural life across historical time.

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On this view, it takes the reiteration of intensive practices of nu-merous sorts to transport such traces across generations, and these reiterations, oneimagines, acquire significant variation as they are dragged through time. If you bracketthe primordial dimension of Freud’s theory while retaining a revised idea of memorytraces, it still remains clear why intellectual reform — in storytelling, deliberation,argument, interpretation, conscious judgment, and so on — is relevant but inadequateto modification of a faith. Reinterpretation in conjunction with practices and exer-cises that tap into an affective region of life beyond the reliable reach of interpreta-tion may be needed. This is a disturbing idea, but perhaps also an unavoidable one.

Mystical States and Deep Pluralism

If you attend to the idea of intensive memory traces transmitted imperfectly acrossgenerations, you also enter the territory of what William James calls “the religiousexperience.” Such experiences are intensive as well as ineffable.13 But James explorespositive elements in subliminal experience not really registered by Freud. If part ofyour agenda is to interrogate the supremacy of a father religion and the corollaryidea of morality as law inscribed in the Mosaic, Augustinian, and Kantian traditions,then Freud takes you in the right direction, for he treats the experience of guilt andlaw to be secondary civilizational formations rather than either literally commandedby a nameless divinity or expressive of the apodictic moral subjectivity of humankind.He thus challenges Moses, Paul, and Kant. But in doing so he tends to reduce the re-ligious experience per se to a civilizational neurosis anchored in archaic memories ofguilt. He does not find much in the subliminal life itself from which to draw positivesustenance in supporting an ethic of cultivation over a morality of law or a robusttradition of pluralism over frantic insistence upon religious unity. Indeed, he tendsto put psychoanalysis in the place just taken away from the one true religious faith.

William James, the hesitant Protestant with Unitarian proclivi-ties, steps into the fray at precisely these points. He emphasizes both the variety ofreligious experiences and the generic element of the ineffable in them. He does noteven demand that faith be anchored in a personal God to count as faith. He thusrules Buddhism in as a mode of religious experience. But, curiously to me, he rulesEpicureanism out, even though both Buddhism and Epicureanism take you to theineffable and neither places a personal god at the end point of its faith. I forgive Jamesthis slight against my (quasi-pagan) faith — one that has found minority expressionacross the long stretch of Western history in the thought of Epicurus, Lucretius,Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Stengers — because his definition of religious ex-perience is otherwise so good at overcoming two risks commonly courted by such

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attempts. The first is the risk of restricting the appreciation of religious experience sosharply that only your own doctrine could provide a plausible example of it; the secondis the risk of locating the religious experience in a form of neurosis that you could over-come only by transcending the impulse to religiosity per se. Paul, for instance, seemsto me to succumb to the first risk in his reading of the Jews and pagans of his day;some of Freud’s most programmatic statements succumb to the second.14 Indeed, if adefinition escapes the first it already inclines toward the second. And vice versa.

James tries to express the positive element in religious experienceby bracketing as far as possible the contending doctrines and institutional practicesto which it is attached. This is an impossible objective, in its purity. And he knows it.For example, Jewish experience is underrepresented in this text, perhaps because ofJames’s own emphasis on the significance of the conversion experience. But the at-tempt nonetheless issues in something productive. The people whose self-reportsJames quotes at length recall mystical experiences. Interestingly, in terms of his rela-tion to Freud, James finds hypnosis to open a window onto the fugitive taxonomy ofreligious experience. Hypnosis involves a temporary shift in one’s conduct originatedbelow the level of direct intellectual control. The religious experience, like it, wellsup from a region below higher intellectual control into the conscious life, but, lesslike it, is typically a radiant experience that often exercises a profound, long-term ef-fect on one’s life.

In seeking, at least initially, an account of religious experienceopen to interpretation in both theological and atheological terms, James puts him-self into conflict with some proponents of Christianity and psychoanalysis alike.Many of the former warrant such experiences as real only if they are given a theisticrendering, and some of the latter contend that they have ample psychoanalytic evi-dence to enclose such experiences in a naturalistic account. This is how, for instance,James speaks to “orthodox Christians” who might resist his phenomenological read-ings because they seem to remain agnostic about the role of divinity in them. He istalking about the differences between those who experience a sudden conversion andthose who slide into it gradually:

One word more, though . . . , lest the final purpose of my explanation of sud-denness by subliminal activity be misunderstood. I do indeed believe that ifthe Subject have no liability to such subconscious activity, or if his consciousfields have a hard ring of a margin that resists incursions from beyond it, hisconversion must be gradual if it occur, and must resemble any simple growthof new habits. . . . But if you, being orthodox Christians, ask me as a psycholo-gist whether the reference of a phenomenon to a subliminal self does not ex-

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clude the notion of the direct presence of the Deity altogether, I have to sayfrankly that as a psychologist I do not see why it necessarily should. . . . Butjust as our primary wide-awake consciousness throws open our senses to thetouch of things material, so it is logically conceivable that if there be higherspiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological condition oftheir doing so might be our possession of a subconscious region which aloneshould yield access to them. The hubbub of the waking life might close adoor which in the dreamy Subliminal might remain ajar or open.15

But perhaps objections to James’s reading of mystical experiencewill also come from another direction, from some materialists and nontheists whodoubt that there is such a “subconscious region” of experience, however interpreted.Our engagement with Freud’s account of memory traces may have gone some waytoward weakening that judgment. Consider as well the work of V. S. Ramachandran,a brain researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. According to Ramachan-dran, a small subset of people who have epileptic seizures have a “focal” type ofseizure; it generates a process of “kindling” between the lower brain nodules and thelimbic system. The result is often something very much like a mystical experience:

But most remarkable of all are those patients who have deeply moving spiri-tual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense thatthey are in direct communication with God. . . . I find it ironic that this senseof enlightenment, this absolute conviction that Truth is derived at last, shouldderive from limbic structures concerned with emotions rather than from thethinking, rational parts of the brain that take so much pride in their abilityto discern truth and falsehood.16

Let’s not worry about the “irony” by which Ramachandran seemsto reserve thinking to the higher structures, for he later acknowledges the depen-dence of the higher brain regions on the limbic structures in thinking and judgment.The point now, perhaps, is to compare the young girl laughing when the probetouches exactly the right spot on her brain (discussed in the previous chapter) to themystical experience that sometimes accompanies focal seizures. The general capacitythe girl has for laughter is triggered by the probe at one moment and by other signsat other moments, when, for instance, funny things are said in her presence. Thesame thing might be true of mystical experience. The probe and the seizure mayboth tap into a human capacity that can be triggered in other ways as well — by aseizure in one instance, say, and a religious experience in another. The first question


before us is: Do some humans have a capacity for mystical experiences that is moredeveloped than that of most humans? Ramachandran’s study lends some support tothe idea that they do.

Ramachandran reinforced this point by running an experimentwith two clients who reported intense religious experiences. They were exposed to avariety of artifacts, including scenes of violence and sexually explicit pictures andwords, all of which stimulate intense feelings in most people. A galvanic skin response(GSR) meter was attached to them:

What about the patients? The kindling hypothesis would predict a uniformhigh response to all categories. But to our amazement what we found in thetwo patients tested was a heightened response mainly to religious words andicons. Their responses to the other categories, including the sexual wordsand images . . . was normally diminished compared to what is seen in normalindividuals.17

James, of course, was alert to the biological and psychologicalresearch of his day, and his philosophical psychology itself has become an icon ofsorts to several neuroscientists engaged in this study. The mystical experiences towhich James and Ramachandran allude usually find expression as a radiant feeling ofjoy and generosity. If Damasio is right, these experiences, flowing into consciousnessfrom a subliminal (or virtual) register, do not pass through the network in which theamygdala is centered, for the amygdala is bound to the generation of fear, anxiety,and depression. As Damasio puts it: “The amygdala, however, has little interest inrecognizing or learning about disgust or happiness. Importantly, other structures,just as specifically, are interested in those other emotions.”18 We might say that theFreud of Moses and Monotheism, writing under the shadow of Nazism, explored thoserelays in which the amygdala plays a critical role.

James seeks to explore radiant mystical states, but to do so in sucha way that disables any church, faith, or secular authority from dictating to everyonewhat doctrinal interpretation must be attached to them. His larger point is that absentthe mystical or subliminal layer of being, humans would lack the energy, existentialtrust, and positive affect needed to get on in life. We may differ, however, in the de-gree to which we have access to mystical states. And we often enough find ourselvesplunged into struggles over contending doctrines tied to the very experiences thatare, to put it in the mild terms James himself prefers, difficult to articulate, for thesources of such experience subsist below the threshold of pure representation. So

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James strives to convert his readers — many of whom have already undergone atleast one conversion experience as born-again Christians or born-again atheists — tothree themes, each subject to qualification by the others:

(1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right tobe, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.

(2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for thosewho stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.

(3) They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic con-sciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. Theyshow it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possi-bility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitallyresponds to them, we may freely continue to have faith.19

It would be easy to deconstruct these injunctions. The first, forinstance, contains a qualifier, “usually,” that could undercut the robust pluralism itsupports if pursued very far; and yet if that qualifier were simply dropped, obviousand immediate counterinstances could be brought against the formula. The phrase“absolutely authoritative” ignores multiple side perceptions within the self that mighteventually encourage one to contest the authority invested in that experience, as wellas third-person studies that might show how it is induced artificially in some instances.

James also has a tendency to separate the feelings he delineatestoo sharply from the interpretations that help to fix them. This tendency can be cor-rected through a highlighting of the paradoxical character of the states themselves:the sources from which the experiences emanate subsist below the threshold of purerepresentation, yet to become consolidated as experiences, they must be investedwith interpretation.

With these qualifications and revisions I receive James’s maximsless as fixed formulas and more as an invitation to cultivate a sensibility within individ-uals and an ethos in the political culture, a sensibility in which strong presumptionsin favor of deep pluralism become embodied in the subliminal field of participantsand an ethos of appreciation for pluralism that becomes entrenched in public life itself.

It is inordinate, this call to deep pluralism. It makes the checksand balances of Madisonian and Millian pluralism, situated in the predominantlyChristian culture of a time that moved more slowly, look like child’s play. We are, soit seems, to honor our existential faith in the first instance, according to whateverwork it takes to do so, and then to cultivate self-modesty about its applicability to

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others in order to promote deep pluralism. We are, that is, not only to be born again,but also to grow up a second time. The latter we do by working on ourselves — withinthose very religious and secular institutions through which the first faith was con-solidated — to activate visceral appreciation of the contestability of that faith and tocultivate a presumption of receptive generosity to other faiths. James thus rejects abland ecumenism in which the parties connect only through a thin reed of common-ality, although he is tempted by that route. He endorses a deep pluralism that placesstringent demands on the participants. That idea, as we saw in chapter 2, will seemlike an oxymoron to some.

James applies the idea of deep pluralism not only to the bearersof different “religious” faiths, but also to secular, rationalistic, and, well, psychoanalyticfaiths that sometimes take themselves to rise above the status of deep contestability.Secularism contains a measure of intolerance to which its proponents are sometimestone-deaf, if and as it treats its faith in the sufficiency of public reason, deliberation,intellectualism, justice, or procedure to be entirely above faith. And when it ignoresor deprecates, as it often does, the significance of the visceral register of being tothinking, judgment, and public culture.

Freud takes a couple of steps in the direction commended byJames, through his imagination of Moses as Egyptian and his call to revise selectiveelements within Judaism and Christianity that render the faith of the other too lowly.Many, however, are likely to find the call to deep pluralism to be sacrilegious, polit-ically unrealistic, or both. But let’s continue down the path opened by Freud andJames anyway. Negotiation of an ethos of deep pluralism is the most promising wayto extend freedom in a state already inhabited by proponents of multiple faiths; it isalso the best way to promote generous cross-state and cross-civilizational relationsin a diverse world that is smaller than heretofore because it spins faster. It is, ofcourse, “unrealistic.” Christianity, Protestantism, secularism, the territorial state,constitutionalism, democracy, feminism, and gay rights were also unrealistic beforethey surged into being as new formations. And everything not yet consolidated as anew formation always appears implausible or unrealistic to realists. The question iswhether it is important to pursue this agenda in the contemporary era — and whetherthere is some reason to think it may subsist as a possibility to be promoted.

What James does not do is tell us much about how such an inter-cultural sensibility is to be mixed into the experience of faith. Perhaps his decision toignore the institutional and doctrinal dimensions of religious life contributes to thatomission. So Freud identifies traces that exceed the reach of the counterstory hetells, while James celebrates subliminal states that extend below his intellectual call

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for pluralism. What if deep pluralism requires work upon the same register of life onwhich radiant religious experience resides?

Deep Pluralism and Relational Arts

Where have we wandered? (1) Faith of some sort is ubiquitous to a species in whichineffable experience and memory traces flow into intellectual life. (2) Partly for thatreason, a variety of institutionally organized interpretations of religious experienceare likely to flower, unless many flowers are pulled out by the roots. (3) Since thehonor of a god, the claim to authority of a state, or the prospect of eternal salvationcan hang in the balance, theological disputes are often marked by intense struggleover the type of faith to be sanctioned by the state or the type of state to be sanc-tioned by faith. One political response to this condition is to have the sovereign de-fine the official religion. Hobbes and Rousseau follow such a line, in different ways.Tocqueville follows it too, by making Christianity a civilizational condition for thesuccess of American democracy. A more valiant response is secularism in which reli-gious diversity is shuffled into the private realm. Rawls and Habermas pursue versionsof that approach. But the sovereign response requires violent repression of the diver-sity already there. And secularism is often blind to the element of dogmatic faith inits conception of reason or deliberation and tone-deaf to the politics of becoming. Itsproponents, by remaining deaf to the visceral register in ethical and political life, toooften paint an aura of sufficiency around deliberation or public reason that neithercan sustain. In response, I explore a third vision — a deep pluralism nourished by agenerous ethos of engagement. But such an ethos requires micropolitical work onthe subliminal register. And that work itself can sometimes be dangerous to diversity.

Let us, then, explore further the relations among deep pluralism,spiritual exercise, and micropolitics by returning to Freud’s attempt to narrow therange of relational arts through which work is done on the visceral register of indi-viduals and groups. Freud moves cautiously toward deep pluralism, but the founderof the talking cure is encumbered by a too-restrictive view of the self-artistry by whichreceptivity to this end might be cultivated. One reason for this reserve, doubtless, isthose memory traces that reach back to primordial times. It would be difficult tomodify them if they are as entrenched as Freud takes them to be. You could at mosttry to overcome them. Which is why Freud (in Moses and Monotheism, at least) thinksof ethics mostly on the model of instinctual renunciation. There is also the Freudianidea that ethics at its highest rises above crude instruments such as images, rhythm,ritual, trance, hypnosis, and magic. Moses, “the great stranger,” introduced a morespiritual God to the Jewish people, “one as all loving as he was all-powerful, who,

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averse to all ceremonial and magic, set humanity as its highest aim a life of truth andjustice.”20 This means, first, that the intellect is engaged to control the lower instinctsand, second, that corporeal gymnastics such as ceremony, image, and magic are to beminimized, because they are historically associated with pagan faiths that pander to“the athletic virtues.” So what Freud admires most about the effect of the Mosaicfaith upon Jews is how it “formed their character for good through the disdaining ofmagic and mysticism by encouraging them to progress in spirituality and sublima-tions.”21 Why? It “signified subordinating sense perception to an abstract idea; itwas a triumph of spirituality over the senses; more precisely an instinctual renuncia-tion accompanied by its psychologically necessary consequences.”22 And the athleticvirtues, Freud says, are associated historically with cruel, military cultures.

Perhaps it is wise to refuse to represent or picture experiences ofdivinity that do not assume a form susceptible to representation. Such a refusal couldopen the self to more creative, experimental relations to mystical, subliminal sourcesof inspiration. But it is also critical to liberate the “athletic virtues” from monopolyby the martial arts. I agree, of course, that intellectual regulation of socially devel-oped instincts is one critical strategy of ethics. But Freud’s syncretic urge hesitatesjust when it might have drawn more sustenance from pagan practices endorsed bygenerous, nonmilitary, nontheistic souls such as Epicurus and Lucretius. Freud’s de-preciation of paganism in general may have encouraged him, first, to invest too muchtherapeutic efficacy in the talking cure (even though lying on the couch is itself acorporeal tactic); second, to draw the line of distinction between personal therapyand political ethics at the wrong point; and third, to fail to see how crucial relational,multimedia arts are to ethical life.

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen contends that Freud, after his early period,resisted acknowledgment of the relation between his own practice of therapy andhypnosis. But “transference,” the linchpin of the analytic relation, says Jacobsen, isvery much like hypnosis. It engenders a magical shift in the organization of affectfostered through identification with the therapist. The clean separation Freud soughtbetween analysis and hypnosis breaks down in the practice of transference.

Freud made this point in 1912 in an article on “The Dynamics of Transfer-ence,” and it means among other things that it was becoming more andmore difficult, even impossible, to distinguish between the mechanics ofanalysis and those of hypnosis, even though hypnosis was supposed to havebeen discarded once and for all. If the transference tends to dominate thewhole analytical situation, and if the analyst’s silence, rather than keepingthe transference at bay, actually provokes it, then one can no longer oppose,

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as Freud had done earlier, the pure interpretative listening of the analyst tothe direct suggestion of the hypnotist, or the interventionism of the hypno-tist to the abstentionism of the analyst. . . . We might go so far as to say thatthe whole analytical process moves once again toward the establishment of ahypnotic type of “rapport,” in which the subject speaks and thinks like an-other, and even toward an actual state of trance.23

Jacobsen goes on to explore latent connections between analytictherapy and shamanism, treating them as overlapping strategies to reorganize affectivedispositions operating below the threshold of representation and intellectual regula-tion alone. While applauding Jacobsen’s attempt to reduce the distance between ther-apy and shamanism, I want to consider what falls out in the corollary tendency totreat ethical arts of the self as if they were reducible to therapies to relieve neuroses.Freudian and neo-Kantian theory, differing so significantly in other respects, convergein giving low credibility to relational arts of ethical life. Freud does so to ward offthe athletic virtues of pagan militarism; neo-Kantians do so to protect the intellec-tual purity of morality. To call a tactic of the self a “therapy” in the neo-Kantian tra-dition today is to quarantine it from morality because it falls below action governedby deliberation and the moral will, even though Kant himself maintained a modestrole for “gymnastics” in the moral life as he conceived it.

The difference between therapy and ethics, to me, is not that thefirst adopts a variety of arts for shaping thought-imbued affect while the second op-erates through the will and intellectual principle alone. Both therapy and ethics inpractice draw upon both intellectual capacities and arts of the self. And each is oftenexperimental in the strategies it adopts to reorganize affect. The differences be-tween them are less blatant and elsewhere. You might seek therapy if you suffer con-flicts that make it difficult to function in daily life. In the psychoanalytic tradition, atleast, therapy occurs under the authority of a trained analyst. Ethical artistry, in itshighest forms, is work applied by the self to itself to render its relational proclivitiesmore congruent with principles it professes, or to build up resistance to oppressiveinstitutional disciplines, or to modify a relational pattern of thought or judgmentthat seems closed, or to put the self in the position of responding more generouslyto newly emerging identities that call into question the self ’s implicit sense to embodyin its mode of being the dictates of the universal. Ethical work is typically experimen-tal, since it usually occurs in new contexts where established codes show themselvesto be too blunt and crude and new patterns of visceral judgments have not yet been


consolidated. You do not know exactly what you are doing when you participate init. But such work is not merely experimental, it is also, as we saw in the last chapter,ubiquitous. We are constantly being bombarded by multimedia tactics applied toseveral layers of being, and we regularly develop strategies to work on ourselves inmodest ways not incorporated into the intellectualist narratives of moral theory.

To appreciate the ubiquitous role of tactics, exercises, and artistryto ethical life, it is necessary either to extend the idea of therapy beyond the treat-ment of neurosis or to distinguish ethical exercises from therapeutic interventions byattending more closely to a host of corporeal practices already bound to the ethicallife. Ethical exercises, moreover, do not merely meld into the sanctified territories oftherapeutic and religious practice, they also slide into micropolitics as groups andinstitutions work on each other through a broad array of tactics. Churches consolidatethe faith of their parishioners through multimedia practices such as prayer, ritual, film,liturgy, architectural design, confession, dietary regulations, wedding ceremonies,doctrinal clarification, and music. The professions do it as they organize dinners, awardceremonies, Internet patterns of gossip, informal modes of neglect and punishment,conferences, and editorial boards. Such activities work on intercoded layers of rela-tional being. They help to organize those complex mixtures of word, image, habit,feeling, touch, smell, concept, and judgment that give texture to cultural life. Thehope, in these instances, is that the horizontal ties between participants will resonatewith the vertical layering within them. And vice versa. The hope for pluralists is thatlodged in the interstices between these layers and relays are discrepancies and re-mainders that generate creative energy for pluralization. Relational sensibilities aresometimes moved or modified by such multimedia means, and, again, this complexinterplay between doctrine and tactics works on the affective register of relationallife as well as on the conceptual organization mixed into it.

The Apostle

The dense, often intense, relation between mystical/subliminal states and doctrinalrepresentation and interpretation, then, is not only effectuated by gods, genes, trau-matic experiences, and neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine, sero-tonin, and acetylcholine, it is also mediated by ritual, tactics, arts, and exercises var-iously practiced by members of religions of the Book, Buddhists, Freudians, andNietzscheans, among others.

We can pursue the enigmatic relation between doctrine and ex-ercise within one portion of Christianity by reviewing the experience of an apostle

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who did not know Jesus directly but nonetheless became a representative of his word.The preacher was at first called Sonny by members of his church, perhaps to markhis special relation to Jesus. He brimmed over with spiritual energy, finding expres-sion in his healing practices, his unrelenting evangelism, his long, Jobian debateswith the Lord at night after one disaster or another, and, above all, his exuberant,repetitive appeals to his congregation to chant the name Jee-SUS-uhh in responseto his rhythmic questions about faith and doctrine. But it soon becomes clear thatSonny’s home life is troubled, the evangelist turns out to be a wife abuser and some-thing of a charlatan. The Apostle hovers on the edge of becoming an updated versionof Elmer Gantry, but it soon turns in new directions.

Life turns sour for Sonny, played brilliantly by Robert Duvall,after he finds his wife snuggling in bed with another Christian. Eventually, overcomeby rage, he wields a baseball bat to kill the guy he thinks to be the one, while attend-ing a Little League game in which his kids are playing. After fleeing town he en-gages in a series of loud, abusive debates with his Lord, late at night. When the twofinally negotiate a new peace accord, Sonny christens himself as an apostle in the dirtywater of a small lake in southern Louisiana. His self-anointment may invite compar-ison to Paul, that other apostle who did not know or follow Jesus before his crucifix-ion. Sonny wanders into a small town, where he eventually founds an interracial,evangelical church among a few down-and-out parishioners. The vibrant mixing ofrhythm, music, chanting, and doctrine in this church is inspirational to the strug-gling parishioners, even as it is bracing to the anonymous, charismatic apostle whoministers to them. It is both disturbing and marvelous to observe the multivalentways this hard-living man labors upon himself as he works tirelessly on others, trans-figuring much of the violence in his soul into evangelical energy. Disturbing becausehe works so hard to secure an authoritative role above interrogation. Marvelous be-cause his work upon himself to redirect old energies teaches us something about theubiquity and efficacy of technique. The film closes with the apostle laboring in awork gang after he has been imprisoned for manslaughter.

“Yea, when I walk through the valley of death, who walks withme?” he chants to the gang in rhythm with the swings of their sickles against thethick underbrush. “Jee-SUS-uhh!” they reply in unison with another swing. “Whopromises me everlasting salvation?” “Jee-SUS-uhh!” “When I walk down the streetwho walks with me?” “Jee-SUS-uhh!” “If I go to New York City who walks withme?” “Jee-SUS-uhh,” the gang chants again. “Who walks with me in the middle ofTimes Square?” “Jee-SUS-uhh!” “Who?” “Jee-SUS-uhh!” “Again!” “Jee-SUS-uhh!”

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“One more time.” “Jee-SUS-uhh!” they chant with louder voices and harder swings.The camera pans out and the scene fades as these thundering questions and answersreverberate in rhythm with the dull thud of sickles against the underbrush.

The Apostle is marked by a series of “irrational” scene cuts. JimJarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise is another example of a film punctuated by suchcuts. Between the scenes, a black screen stares blankly at you for several seconds, un-derlining the element of contingency and creativity in the connections forged acrossscenes. Each cut suggests that you cannot, knowing what you did before, predict thenext round of action. That is because between the scenes things are happening at thesubliminal level, unsusceptible to full self-awareness or third-person representation.After the fact, you can fit the action into a narrative that increases in dissonance anddensity as it unfolds. This technique resonates with Epicurean-Bergsonian-Prigoginistconceptions of “dissipative structures” in nature that contain elements of unpre-dictability and self-organization within them, and, even more, with the conduct ofpassionate, culturally sensitive, linguistically skilled beings endowed with complexbody/brain networks.24 Such cuts, marked in distinctive ways by Nietzsche in writ-ten texts (as we saw in chapter 3) and other ways by film directors, signify virtual en-ergies that combine with distinctive events to propel something new into the world.The cuts render the invisibility of these processes visible. Or, better, they representtheir unrepresentability. It is precisely these interruptions that are muted by tightnarratives, classical natural science, and disembodied theories of culture. We might,then, figure the disjunction between The Apostle and its sequel, The Return of theApostle, as an irrational cut.

The Return of the Apostle has not yet been released, but some whohave had a sneak preview are taken with its ability to walk down the forked path ofits predecessor. The film, opening at night in the aftermath of a car accident, recallsthe opening scene of The Apostle. This time, though, the apostle is victim rather thanevangelist. He lies alongside an African American companion in a car that has swervedoff a deserted road. A middle-aged woman stops to help the semiconscious victims.She hesitates for a moment when she sees the prison shirts they are wearing, but shesoftens again as she observes the tattered old Bible that has bounced off the dash-board onto the lap of the passenger. Ruth is a woman of working-class backgroundand Jewish heritage. She works for an international computer company and, so itturns out, is clandestinely involved with a group of hackers wanted by the FBI. Aftergiving the two men water from an unfinished bottle of Pellegrino, she takes them toher house, where they hide out for a week.

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This woman, it becomes clear through interrogation by the devoutescapees, is a Jewish devotee of Jesus.25 While the apostle is drawn to the Jesus ofthe Book of John and the letters of Paul, this iconoclastic intellectual is inspired bythe earthy Jesus of Luke. She inflects that inspiration in a way that forms syncreticconnections to the Reform Judaism she grew up with in Brooklyn. Bookish to a de-gree, she has been inspired by The Religion of Jesus the Jew, as that faith is reviewedby Geza Vermes in a book by that title. She takes seriously the idea that if Moses wasan Egyptian by birth or rearing, it makes a comparable difference that Jesus was aJew. Her eschatalogical Jesus shares something with the Pauline figure, in professing“One God, the Father, maker of heaven and earth, and of things visible and invisi-ble.”26 But her Jesus is not of one substance with the Father; he did not arise fromthe dead after crucifixion; he does not sit on the right hand of the father, and heshall not return to judge “both the quick and the dead.”

Ruth’s quirky faith throws the apostle and his companion, Peter,into a quandary. What are they to do with a blasphemous benefactor who is pre-pared to secure false identification papers for them so they can be born once again?After a series of loud conversations with his Lord, punctuated by a few perusals ofLuke, the apostle concludes that Jesus, because his love and beneficence overflow,bestows a variety of religious experiences upon his devotees. This new crisis encour-ages him to become a bit of a Jamesian.

Peter the hijacker, Ruth the hacker, and the apostle eventuallyfound an interracial congregation outside Memphis called the Syncretic Temple ofJesus. It is Pentecostal in its rhythms, songs, and chants, syncretic in its doctrinal rela-tion to Jesus.27 Organized as a series of rural temples linked through a sophisticatednetwork of Internet connections, the faith provides a relay point for visceral contactbetween a large variety of down-and-out people who seek strong medicine, admirethe word of Jesus, and inflect that word in theologically diverse ways. Each Satur-day-morning meeting, televised from the mother temple, is highlighted by a seriesof rhetorical questions to the congregation blurted by Peter, the apostle, and Ruth,followed by chants of “Jee-SUS-uhh” from the congregation. In the Syncretic Templedifferent renderings of the word of Jesus by maverick Catholics, Jews, Protestants,Islamists, and a sprinkling of southern Emersonians are mixed into the rubric of aPentecostal liturgy. Judeo-Christian Shamanism, you might call it. Or even Judeo-Christian-Jamesian-Shamanism. As one site of doctrinal syncretism and Pentecostalpractice, the temple eventually puts pressure on a variety of other faiths to come toterms with elements of syncretism in themselves and the profoundly contestablecharacter of the specific doctrines they confess.

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I cannot join the Syncretic Temple at this time. I would, however,be pleased to preach a version of neo-Epicureanism to its members some Saturdaymorning, if invited to do so.

Pentecostal Pluralization

Freud is wise to respect syncretism, to invoke memory traces, and, therefore, to bewary of pure intellectualism, though his aversion to paganism discourages him fromexploring the role of technique and exercise robustly enough. James is astute to in-voke mystical experience as a sheet of being that subsists below intellectual sophisti-cation while flowing into the higher intellectual processes, although his study of thevarieties of religious experience did not carry him far into the complex relations be-tween institutionalized doctrine and practical tactics. The apostle is provocative inenacting everyday syntheses by which people cultivate trust in life in others even asthey work upon their own being, and in suggesting how those practices vary accord-ing to the type of medicine needed by people in different subject positions. Ruth iswise too. She knows that in contemporary Western states, with the diverse historiesfrom which each is composed, deep pluralism, among other things, involves multiplereadings of the historical meaning and contemporary bearing of Jesus. And some ofthese readings will extend beyond the cosmology and governance of Christianity.Ruth, in effect, runs a practical test to determine the extent to which a variety ofChristians either have always surpassed or now transcend the existential resentmentFreud so baldly attributed to them in Moses and Monotheism. For Ruth understandsthat the very practices by which people are inducted into a faith must, in a culture ofdeep pluralism, be tracked by a micropolitics through which presumptive generositytoward other theistic and nontheistic faiths becomes mixed into the visceral registerof being and the public ethos of life. Here the interplay between doctrine and exer-cise is given a cool twist, as you turn the tactics by which your reflective faith hasbeen secured gently back upon the element of resentment and dogmatism that maybe attached to it, doing so out of existential care for different responses to persistingmysteries of existence.

I am not saying that an ethos of deep pluralism is a probableachievement today. I am merely suggesting, first, that the actual diversity of theisticand nontheistic faiths today combines with the insufficiency of secular intellectual-ism to pose the definite need for such an ethos and, second, that the possibility of itsapproximation requires close attention to the relation between practices that impingeon the visceral register of relational life and the doctrinal interpretations we embrace.Political and cultural theory should focus first and foremost on possibilities that speak

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to pressing needs of the time. Concentration on probabilities alone can be left to bu-reaucrats and consultants.

A public ethos of deep pluralism does not eliminate politics fromlife, or sink it into a tub of beautiful souls. It is itself an effect of micro- and macro-politics. It forms the lifeblood of democratic politics by folding creativity and gen-erosity into intracultural negotiations over issues unsusceptible to settlement throughpreexisting procedure, principle, or interest aggregation alone. On this reading, artsof the self, micropolitics, private and public deliberation, a generous ethos of engage-ment, and macropolitical action are interconnected, even though valuable dissonancesand resistances well up between them.

In the Ethics Spinoza says, “Nobody has yet determined the limitsof the body’s capabilities.”28 That dictum still stands. When you consider the relationof, say, Moses, Jesus, Paul, Freud, and James to the cultural worlds in which theyparticipated and to the world today to which each has added surprising ingredients,it seems pertinent to add a corollary to the first dictum: Nobody has yet determinedthe limits of cultural capability.

We still do not know, for instance, how deeply entrenched multi-dimensional pluralism could become. We simply know that it is important today tostrive to actualize an ethos of deep, multidimensional pluralism. This is a domainwhere political speculation, experimentalism, and enactment draw upon the resourcesof history, knowledge, and experience while stretching beyond them. As the greatexperiment proceeds, it is wise to pay attention to the registers upon which the cul-tural dispositions to closure or pluralism are established.29 Any vision of pluralism thatfails to come to terms with the layered texture of being remains imprisoned in a nar-row intellectualism insufficient to the world.

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A Rift in Time

in a brilliant little essay titled “What Time Is It?” Sheldon Wolin contendsthat the homogeneous, slow time appropriate to a democratic politics of place hasbeen overwhelmed by several “zones of time” moving at different tempos.1 “Econ-omy” and “culture” now move at a breakneck pace, due to changes in the infrastruc-ture of transportation, communication, and entertainment. The effects on demo-cratic deliberation are pernicious:

Starkly put, political time is out of synch with the temporalities, rhythms,and pace governing economy and culture. Political time, especially in soci-eties with pretensions to democracy, requires an element of leisure, not inthe sense of a leisure class (which is the form in which ancient writers con-ceived it), but in the sense, say, of a leisurely pace. This is owing to theneeds of political action to be preceded by deliberation and deliberation, asits ‘deliberate’ part suggests, takes time because, typically, it occurs in a set-ting of competing or conflicting but legitimate considerations. . . . That po-litical time has a preservative function is unsurprising. Since time immemo-rial political authorities have been charged with preserving bodies, goods,souls, practices and circumscribed ways of life.2

Democracy and Time

Culture and economy are governed by “innovation, change andreplacement through obsolescence.” The pace they pursue exceeds that appropriateto democratic place and deliberation. Indeed, the contemporary pace of fashion andwar threatens to obliterate democratic politics. “Fashion shares with war a certainpower: it forces disappearance. . . . Each is in the business of replacement. Fashion pro-duces new music, dress forms, new language or slogans. Wars produce new economies(‘the German miracle’), new cities, new weapons and new wars.”3

Wolin wants the world to slow down so that democracy can flour-ish. He wants the politics of place to return. I participate in such a wish to some de-gree, some of the time. But I also think that it is wise today for democrats to be waryof nostalgia for a world of long, slow time and a circumscribed politics of place. Thepolitics of local place (valorized by Wolin) and the state (valorized by others) areboth pertinent to democratic action in the contemporary period. But they are insuf-ficient to it. Those sites of action must be linked to several others. Besides, the veryasymmetries of time Wolin delineates can also help diverse constituencies come toterms actively with the historical basis of what they are.

I agree with Wolin that it is possible today to discriminate roughlyamong several zones of time, in a world where each zone regularly impinges uponthe others. The velocity of missile warfare is much greater than that of tanks surgingacross the border between two desert states, and both of those move much fasterthan ground troops marching across a border. Rapid eruptions in economic and po-litical life exceed the pace appropriate to democratic deliberation, and the pace ofchange in religious, moral, sensual, gender, and ethnic identities, while perhaps fasterthan heretofore, is still slower than the foregoing processes. As we have seen, similarasymmetries of pace operate within the human body/brain network.

It is pertinent to recall how the pace of change in human habit,disposition, sensibility, and cultural ethos does not match the tempo set in the fastestzones Wolin identifies. That’s why I am not disposed to assimilate culture to fashion.Thinking, culture, identity, and ethics are stratified processes, involving relays andfeedback loops between layers of being operating at different capacities and speeds.So fashion forms a component within culture, rather than serving as the key markerof it. Ethical judgment, for instance, is already well under way before you tend to itconsciously.

A world composed of asymmetries of pace is more replete withambiguity than Wolin acknowledges. On the negative side, the acceleration of speedoften supports corporate colonization of new spaces inside and outside highly orga-

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nized capitalist states. In today’s world it is less that the large consume the small, morethat fast process overwhelms slow activity. The ensuing politics of capture often fo-ments reactive movements in the name of nationhood and religious purity, expressedas attempts to slow the world down by returning to a unity imagined to have beenintact sometime in the past. But to fend off both the takeovers and these reactions tothem it is necessary to participate in fast-paced processes. I suspect, then, that comingto terms cautiously but affirmatively with the accelerated pace of life can both fosterdemocratic rule and chasten fundamentalist drives. The irony is that reactive drivesto retard the pace of life seldom if ever succeed in promoting that result. They suc-ceed, instead, in locating vulnerable constituencies to hold politically accountablefor the fast pace of life.

The acceleration of the fastest zones — and the consequent ac-centuation of difference in tempo between fast and slow processes — forms a consti-tutive dimension of the late-modern condition. Only a catastrophic breakdown ofthe world economy — which is not at all out of the question — could slow down theworld enough to conform to the pace of nineteenth-century localism that inspiresWolin’s Tocquevillian model of democracy. The acceleration of pace carries danger,then. But it also sets a condition of possibility for achievements that democrats andpluralists prize. The question for me, then, is not how to slow the world down, buthow to work with and against a world moving faster than heretofore to promote apositive ethos of pluralism.

There are no guarantees in this domain. But variations of speeddo sometimes encourage people to become more modest about what they are in re-lation to what they are not. The asymmetry between the pace of change in clothingfashion and in school curricula and faith practices, for instance, may have contributedto a positive renegotiation of standards of femininity, piety, chastity, and deferenceover the past several decades. That new pluralization is still poised in doubt, ofcourse. But, when appropriately addressed, dissonances between zones of time helpto nourish a certain modesty about what you are and a spirit of presumptive gen-erosity toward other constituencies. Our engagement with The Apostle in the lastchapter disclosed one way in which such possibilities can unfold. Evangelical move-ments often adopt an ambiguous orientation to pace, drawing upon fast-paced me-dia to work upon the visceral register of faith.

A certain asymmetry of pace, then, is critical to democratic plu-ralism. And yet these same temporal conditions also foster the fragility of democracy.They threaten to turn against the very condition they enable. The judgment that a

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fast-paced world promotes danger and suffering as well as the possibility of a gener-ous ethos of pluralism encourages me to fold a stutter or break into my vision ofdemocratic politics. A slow, homogeneous world often supports undemocratic hier-archy because it irons out discrepancies of experience through which constituenciescan become reflective about self-serving assumptions they habitually use to appraisethemselves in relation to others. But in a world marked by asymmetrical zones ofspeed, it is critical that citizens in a variety of walks of life be provided with structuralopportunities for periodic escape and retreat from a fast-paced life. Such retreats en-able us to revisit from time to time selective assumptions and dispositions that havegripped us and to refresh our energies to reenter the rat race. In my democraticutopia, for instance, sabbatical leaves would be expanded rather than contracted.Opportunities for midlife education of people in various subject positions would beextended greatly too. Such innovations, of course, are far from sufficient to curtailfixed patterns of hierarchy. But they are pertinent.

Within this preliminary debate between Wolin and me on therelation between democracy and pace there is probably a more elemental difference.To abbreviate, Wolin and I both reject the cyclical image of slow time adopted bymany ancients. But I also find myself at odds with progressive, teleological, and lin-ear conceptions of time set against it. Against these four images I embrace the ideaof rifts or forks in time that help to constitute it as time. A rift as constitutive of timeitself, in which time flows into a future neither fully determined by a discernible pastnor fixed by its place in a cycle of eternal return, nor directed by an intrinsic purposepulling it along. Free time. Or, better, time as becoming, replete with the dangersand possibilities attached to such a world.

A diverse array of thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Kafka,Bergson, Arendt, and James, participate in such an image of time. We have alreadyvisited versions of it in the thought of Prigogine and Deleuze. Here is the variantenunciated by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The key statement occurs whileZarathustra is addressing the “vision” and “riddle” of time through reference to thefugitive character of the “moment.” He is debating a “dwarf” who embodies thespirit of gravity. They have just halted before a gateway on their walk:

“Behold this gateway, dwarf!” I continued, “It has two faces. Two paths meethere; no one has yet followed either to its end. This long lane stretches backfor an eternity. And the long lane out there, that is another eternity. Theycontradict each other, these paths; they offend each other face to face; and it


is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway isinscribed ‘Moment.’ . . . do you believe, dwarf, that these paths contradicteach other eternally?”

“All that is straight lies” the dwarf murmured contemptuously. “Alltruth is crooked; time itself is a circle.”4

It appears at first that Zarathustra supports a linear conceptionof determinism against the dwarf ’s cyclical picture of eternal return. That would beironic for the thinker himself reputed to be a proponent of eternal return. But sucha reading soon dissolves into another that folds eternal return into an acyclical phi-losophy of time. What returns eternally is the dissonant conjunction of the moment.In every moment, the pressures of the past enter into a dissonant conjunction withuncertain possibilities of the future. The fugitive present is both constituted by thisdissonant conjunction between past and present and rendered uncertain in its direc-tion by it. Often enough that uncertainty is resolved through continuity; but belowthe threshold of human attention indiscernible shifts and changes have accumulated,sometimes finding expression in small mutations and sometimes in large events. Sooccasionally time forks in new and surprising directions. A rift in time, engenderedby the dissonant conjunction between complex systems with some capacity for self-organization and unexpected events not smoothly assimilable by them. A rift throughwhich at any moment a surprising fork may emerge, ushering microscopic, small,large, or world historical shifts into an open future unsusceptible to full coverage bya smooth narrative, sufficient set of rules, or tight causal explanation. The key to amore generous ethic, according to Zarathustra, is that you work on yourself to affirmrather than resent the rift in time that forms a constitutive condition of existence.

Politics is rendered possible and dangerous by the constitutiverift in the moment. “Becoming” — that uncertain process by which the new flows orsurges into being — is rendered possible by the rift. Nietzsche denies that a Godstands at the apex or base of being. He also thinks that only a God could have fashioneda world that was both calculable all the way down and fully susceptible to human ca-pacities of cognition and causal explanation. He thinks that nineteenth-century scien-tific theories that postulate simple linear causality were still feeding off the remainsof a theology they purported to transcend. Some modern theists concur with thispoint. Kierkegaard, Bergson, and James, who place a mysterious divinity at the baseof time, nonetheless advance a remarkably similar view. Time forks, either intrinsi-cally or because human capacities of measurement and cognition on one side and world

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processes on the other do not mesh neatly with one another. It doesn’t really matterthat much which. Either way, it becomes wise to fold the expectation of surprise andthe unexpected into the very fabric of our explanatory theories, interpretive schemes,religious identities, territorial conceptions of politics, and ethical sensibilities. Andto work on ourselves subtly to overcome existential resentment of these expectations.

Attention to the rift, however, does sow anxiety in those who seekclosure in the above-noted domains, pressing many to reinstate forcefully authorita-tive understandings most credible in slower and less asymmetrical regimes of time.Anxiety, indeed, can be read as a sign or symptom of the rift, during a time whenmany are not prepared to come to terms affirmatively with it.

In chapter 3 we encountered in Ilya Prigogine’s work an imageof science close to Nietzsche’s reading of the rift in time. Prigogine explores complexphysical systems that engender new crystallizations irreducible to the explanatoryresources preceding them. These new crystallizations emerge out of unpredictable“forks” or “bifurcations” in systems that contain both impressive powers of self-organization and exquisite sensitivity to selective changes in the external environ-ment. If you find Prigogine persuasive, you may be encouraged to fold appreciationof the variable speeds of geological processes, biological mutations, and the humanbody/brain network into cultural theory itself. Such a nonlinear conception of timein nature enables cultural theorists — who too often today read nature out of cul-ture — to fold nature, biology, and human embodiment back into their conceptionsof thinking, culture, identity, judgment, and becoming.

While she did not negotiate this last move, Hannah Arendt alsoembraced the idea of a rift or “gap” in time. She too thought that without such rifts“the new” — exceeding the reach of available stories and explanatory theories thatprecede it — could not surge into being. With the rift, our established narratives,rules, explanations, and sedimented codes of morality are periodically subjected tosurprising jolts and shocks. Drawing upon Kafka and Nietzsche, Arendt says that thepresent is the gap through which life flows from past into future. It is hence “themost futile and slippery of tenses.” It

is no more than the clash of a past, which is no more, with a future, which isapproaching and not yet there. Man lives in this in-between, and what hecalls the present is a life long fight against the dead weight of the past, drivinghim forward with hope, and the fear of a future (whose certainty is only death),driving him backward toward the “quiet of the past,” with nostalgia for andremembrance of the only reality he can be sure of.5

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Arendt fears that the late-modern acceleration of pace accentu-ates a dangerous nostalgia to return to the “quiet of the past,” a quiet placed inquotes because our contemporary memory of it is unavoidably inflected differentlythan it would have been experienced during the fugitive present when the horizon ofthe future was open. For the future is never what it used to be, and neither is the past.This nostalgia for a comforting image of the past expresses anxiety about the secu-rity of immortality, existential meaning, moral boundaries, explanatory confidence,and narrative closure. All these are called into question by the acceleration of pace.Arendt herself is deeply ambivalent about the condition she diagnoses. I concur inthat ambivalence enough to say that without the pull of the past the horizon of thefuture would explode into an abyss. With it, the fundamental issues are, first, how toengage the rift and, second, how to respond thoughtfully to the acceleration of pacewithout falling into either a dangerous insistence upon slowing the world down to asnail’s pace or a crude celebration of high velocity per se. The challenge for thosewho embrace the rift is how to reconfigure the balance between past and future in aworld whirling faster than heretofore. And how to respond with agonistic respect tothose who do not embrace the idea of a rift in a context where neither this cosmologynor those ranged against it is soon likely to receive a definitive demonstration. Theintellectual challenge is how to come to terms productively with the ambiguous re-lations among time, pace, freedom, plurality, and democracy. None of us may reallybe prepared to meet this challenge. But time is short.

You might say that as the asymmetries between different zonesof time widen it becomes easier to discern the rift, which, as Nietzsche, Deleuze,Prigogine, Arendt, and I contend, is constitutive of time itself. But, again, that verysuspicion may tempt many into a dangerous, reactive response: into a series of fa-miliar political movements to slow time down to conceal the rift. Such reactivedrives are not too likely to grab hold effectively of the processes of capitalist inven-tion, finance, investment, labor migration, geographic expansion, and intraterritorialcolonization, even though these are preeminent forces propelling the acceleration ofpace. For these processes flow through and across states in ways that make it diffi-cult for any territorially organized entity to govern them effectively. The collapse ofthe Soviet Union is probably bound up in part with that state’s inability either toavoid these processes or to absorb them into its political economy without trans-forming it. So now resentment against the acceleration of pace becomes projectedupon religious and nationalist drives to identify a series of vulnerable constituenciesas paradigmatic enemies of territorial culture, traditional morality, unified politics,and Christian civilization. The atheist, the postmodernist, the gay, the prostitute, the

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Jew, the media, the nomadic Indian, and the Gypsy have all been defined as paradig-matic agents of restlessness, nomadism, superficial fashion, immorality, and dangerby defenders of close integration among political territory, religious unity, and moralmonism. Such definitions displace upon vulnerable constituencies anxiety about thepace of life and the rift in time. The underlying enemy is speed and uncertainty, butit is difficult to grab hold of the capitalist systems in which these processes are set.The hopeful thing is how many contemporary Christians, in the name of Christianlove, join others in resisting and transcending these ugly equations.

When Wolin’s presentation of the acceleration of pace in severalzones of life is juxtaposed to my portrayal of the rift in time, a different picture of thecontemporary condition emerges. Uneven pace across zones helps to reveal morepoignantly what has always been in operation, a rift between past and future that helpsto constitute the essence of time and to enter into the constitution of politics itself.It now becomes possible to come to terms with this condition in a more affirmativeway. I do not think, again, that the reading of time I endorse has been proved defin-itively, nor is either it or the interpretations it contends against apt to be. But this in-terpretation does pose powerful challenges to those who implicitly treat one of thealternative conceptions of time as if it were undeniable. To embrace the rift is tochallenge demands in contemporary social science for consummate explanation, cul-tural theory for smooth narrative, moral philosophy for thick, stable universals, andpopular culture for the sufficiency of common sense.

Even as efforts to slow the world down fail, they do untold harmto many constituencies striving to respond in new ways to injuries imposed uponthem and new possibilities opened up before them. Perhaps the best way to proceedis to strive to modulate the fastest and most dangerous military and corporateprocesses while intervening politically within accelerated processes of communica-tion, travel, population flows, and cultural intersection to support a more generousethos of pluralism. Such a double orientation does not scrap the advantages of terri-torial democracy, but it does support democratic movements that extend beyond theparameters of the territorial state as well as operate within it. The challenge is howto support the positive connections among democracy, uneven zones of tempo, andthe rift in time without legitimating a pace of life so fast that the promise of democ-racy becomes translated into fascist becoming machines.

I am not positive how best to negotiate the in-between in aworld spinning faster than heretofore. I doubt that anybody is entirely sure how todo so. Nonetheless, to nudge exploration forward a few steps I will first make thecase for augmenting Wolin’s democratic localism with a practice of cross-border

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politics that speaks to multiple sites of action and the acceleration of pace. I willthen discuss more broadly how the acceleration of pace supports democratic plural-ism in some ways while posing risks to it in others. Then in the last chapter I willchallenge the sufficiency of two models of politics that reach beyond the parametersof the state while presupposing a concentric image of culture set in long, slow time.

Local Grievances and Cross-Border Movements

Wolin is acute in his understanding of how the initiatives of local constituencies of-ten inspire the most creative and productive drives to democratize life. Here is a for-mulation that conveys that appreciation:

The possibility of renewal draws on a simple fact that ordinary individualsare capable of creating new cultural patterns of commonality at any mo-ment. Individuals who concert their powers for low income housing, workerownership of factories, better schools, better health care, safer water, con-trols over toxic waste disposals, and a thousand other concerns of ordinarylives are experiencing a democratic moment and contributing to the discov-ery, care, and tending of a commonality of shared concerns. Without neces-sarily intending it, they are renewing the political by contesting the forms ofunequal power that democratic liberty and equality have made possible andthat democracy can eliminate only by betraying its own values.6

As he reviews such local movements Wolin inspires anybody in-habited by democratic sentiment. He identifies issues that people in different subjectpositions can periodically mobilize around together; he plays up the spontaneouscharacter of these creative outbursts; and he contrasts such creative moments to theeveryday politics of campaign financing, elections, corporate lobbying, and judicialdecision from sites high above ordinary experience. My only concern is that in hislaudable effort to highlight a vital element in the democratic experience he purifiesthat experience too much. The desire to purify democracy may contribute to disen-chantment with its contemporary complexity, and that could in turn promote disaf-fection from some of the very sites of democratic action that help to make possiblethe localism Wolin admires.

One hot issue in Wolin’s home state of California concerns theborder between Mexico and California. Due in part to economic hard times in Mex-ico, a large number of Mexicans cross the border to find work in California, Arizona,and Texas. The economic and political trials that propel them to do so are no doubtdetermined in part by the place allotted to Mexico in the international economy.

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The illegal alien, whose life is a constant struggle, becomes a deeply ambiguous fig-ure in the political life of California. As possessors of cheap labor power, undocu-mented workers are valuable to agribusiness and fast-food restaurants seeking tomaintain a competitive edge in the market. But as aliens caught in a miserable situa-tion in a country mobilized around symbols of nationality they are in a poor positionto complain about pay levels, organize unions, establish roots in the locality, or par-ticipate as citizens in public life. Their labor power renders them valuable whiletheir illegality renders them silent and anonymous. This structural ambiguity inten-sifies their exploitability. That combination, in turn, further increases their value toagribusiness and fast-food employers.

The structural ambiguity maintains a supply of cheap labor avail-able to corporate elites and small companies. But it also spurs new dimensions of apolice state into being as the border between Mexico and the United States becomesa zone of low-intensity war, and as the politics of surveillance spreads to the tradi-tional populace and the interior of the country. Look at customs procedures, conver-sion of the Social Security number into an ID card, airport surveillance practices, creditcard controls, longer prison sentences, compromises of Miranda rights, spread ofdrug-testing programs, arrest information attached to driver’s licenses, interstate shar-ing of arrest and detention records, highway stop and search policies, and prohibi-tions against American travel to Cuba, if you wonder what I mean.

“Aliens” are not merely those inside the territory without citi-zenship rights: they are also coded as strange beings whose presence is threateningto “natives” or, in this case, real citizens. Their ambiguous position intensifies divi-sions within the citizen class of low-skill workers as a whole, and that too works tothe advantage of employers. Traditional low-skill workers, who have formal rights toeducation, citizenship, and welfare support, feel threatened economically and organi-zationally by the infusion of aliens. They fear that their jobs, the disciplinary actionsthey are subjected to at work, or the pay they can hope to earn will be affected ad-versely. Moreover, they resent the taxes they are called upon to pay to police theborder, cover welfare, provide new schools for the children of illegal immigrants,build new prisons, and subsidize emergency health care. The infusion of aliensthreatens their sense of security as workers, spouses, parents, and citizens who canraise families and participate in the good life available within the limited resourcescurrently available to them. In this tense situation a racialization of economic andcultural issues readily arises to divide constituencies who would need to collaborateif decent pay, reasonable working conditions, good schools, and secure health carewere to be gained. These sharp divisions within the working class also are coded as


differences between constituencies thought to be properly located on different sidesof the Rio Grande/Bravo.

What emerges from this historical conjunction of contingent ele-ments — including the geographic border between Mexico and the United States cre-ated by past wars, the asymmetrical development of the two economies, the struc-ture of the fast-food and agricultural economy in the American Southwest, theorganization of illegal entry strategies, the entanglement of the border in the drugtrade and an American war on drugs inside and outside the country, the tax and wel-fare system of the United States, and the racialization and territorialization of ethnicdivisions within and around the working class — is a powerful contrivance of eco-nomic discipline and political separation. No central power intended it, even thoughit is bound together by the diverse intentions of agents at multiple sites with differ-ential power. And yet, once it emerges as a contingent constellation, a variety of con-stituencies caught in it face powerful pressures to adjust their goals, strategies, andinterests to its limits and possibilities. The result is a durable pattern of disequilibriumin which the Rio Grande/Bravo border is policed enough to placate American ethnicnationalists but not enough to cut off the supply of cheap labor; in which illegal im-migrants are pressed to maintain political anonymity within an arduous system oflabor; and in which conservative politicians fan ethnic hostilities to curtail the flowof people and drugs, increase prison construction, expand police surveillance, speedup capital punishment, and cut back state programs for public education, welfare,union support, and affirmative action.

An operational political economy is crafted from numerous suchformations. While Marxist theories of capitalist contradiction sometimes tend toschematize the conflicts and trajectory of political economy, and while structuralistsformalize them, contemporary cultural theorists of intersubjectivity, in their eager-ness to resist these two strategies of schematization, all too often lose touch withhow such complex, contingent transstate formations materialize specific zones of life.

Such a powerful contrivance of differential economic disciplineand political separation is a layered, contingent contraption jerry-rigged from multi-ple materials. It neither reflects a profound dialectical logic that propels it nor con-tains a deep structure unknowable to its “role bearers.” As a loosely structured modusvivendi crafted out of complex relays connecting the pain of refugees, armed borderpatrols, the market power of corporate elites, the ideological sanctification of marketforces, the demands of consumers, the difficulties traditional blue-collar workers havein making ends meet, the mobilization of layered identity anxieties, the identifica-tion of drugs crossing the border with the decline of public morality, widespread

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frustration with a tax system that does not serve the needs of ordinary people, andinterventions by the state, it is likely to contain a variety of leakages, resistances, andpotential lines of modification. It may be possible to modify the existing pattern, oreven to extract a set of positive possibilities from it. There are no guarantees here,however. Contraptions sometimes fall apart, sometimes keep running for a while,and sometimes become parts of new constructions. The absence of guarantees maybe what encourages many intersubjectivists to ignore them, dialecticians to build ahistorical logic into them, and structuralists to invest them with a deep structure.There are, however, merely contingent lines of possibility to probe and test in a con-trivance of discipline and division.

If it is possible to disrupt and reorganize this cross-border con-trivance it will surely require political action at multiple sites to do so. The key inthis instance may be to devise political strategies to enable immigrants to break outof the anonymity forced upon them by their ambiguous position. Thus, as this his-torical pattern of immigration has escalated over a few decades, and as recent entrantsforge alliances with previous immigrants who are legal citizens and entrenched inseveral sectors of civil society, it may become possible to mobilize protest move-ments and electoral strategies to challenge the chauvinism and antiwelfarism thathave gained such a strong foothold. It is even possible that labor organizations in theSouthwest will track the mobility of the corporations that employ them and exploremodes of selective collaboration between workers on both sides of the border. Andthat an enlarged constituency of workers and consumers will come to appreciate theneed to introduce new programs in health care, education, transportation, and so onthat reduce per capita costs as they are extended more generally.7 For the times theyare a-changin’. These include changes in the composition of labor and capital onboth sides of the Rio Grande/Bravo; the emergence of a healthy cynicism about thesufficiency of market solutions to basic issues of housing, work, job security, educa-tion, transportation, and retirement; the critical reaction by large groups of Hispanicvoters in key electoral states to campaigns of vilification recently waged against them;and the critical response by other constituencies to their increased knowledge of theugly character and diffuse effects of these border campaigns. For, again, as even theRepublican Party has slowly begun to realize, there is a large Hispanic minority inthree of the large states any candidate for president must try to capture to win a na-tional election — California, Texas, and Florida.

If and as such a critical assemblage consolidates, localism will bepertinent but radically insufficient to its effectiveness. Local actions, larger socialmovements within California and Texas, electoral strategies aimed at these states

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and the national state, and cross-border, citizen organizations are all relevant to apolitics that shakes and moves this contrivance of discipline and division. Moreover,all the public media through which the contrivance has become consolidated mustbe deployed in political efforts to redesign its balances and possibilities. For sensibil-ities have to be moved as well as policies. The film Lone Star by John Sayles, to takejust one example, speaks effectively to these cross-border issues in ways that help tonudge the sensibilities and imagination of possibility of many on both sides of theborder. By the time the lead character advises people in a small town in southernTexas struggling with border issues to “forget the Alamo,” it has also become clearto a variety of viewers how much futile pain and injustice have been generated bythese border hostilities. Radio, television, labor meetings, cross-border citizen actions,films, and Internet connections all play a part in the countermovement. The paceand scale of contemporary patterns of political economy not only help to organizethe contrivance in question, they pluralize the media and sites through which to re-fashion it.

That is to say, today you can reduce fugitive democracy to localinitiatives or mourn the eclipse of democracy by identifying its crucial dimensionwith a pace and scale of life that has passed. But to do either is to endanger the com-plex form of democracy possible in the late-modern time in the interest of pursuinga model of pure democracy that has never existed and is unsuited for contemporarylife. In a fast-paced time when speed compresses distance, a plurality of intercon-nected sites of democratic action must be activated if ordinary people are to have ahand in shaping the working conditions, educational possibilities, forms of identity,income levels, ecological environment, border relations, and citizen entitlementsavailable to them.

Tempo and Experimentalism

We have deferred several pertinent issues. It might be said that if the tempo of eco-nomic and cultural life had not accelerated so much, there would be less need formultiple sites of political action and less dissonance between the pace of economiclife and the pace appropriate to democratic deliberation. Is there, then, more to besaid by democrats themselves in favor of the compression of distance by the acceler-ation of pace? Can there be a positive relation between the accelerated pace of con-temporary life and admirable possibilities of democratic activism and citizenship? Toengage these issues I draw selectively upon Friedrich Nietzsche. Despite what a fewlevelers and simplifiers occasionally say, I do not think that Nietzsche himself was ademocrat or that he offers a direct answer to the questions posed here. That is why I

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seek to rework his ideas rather than merely to represent them. The first time I engagedNietzsche’s thought publicly, I stated that I stood in a relation of “antagonistic in-debtedness” to it. Such a relation “would appreciate the reach of Nietzschean thoughtas well as its sensitivity to the complex relations between resentment and the pro-duction of otherness, but it would turn the genealogist of resentment on his head byexploring democratic politics as a medium through which to expose resentment andto encourage the struggle against it.”8 As I have continued to think with and againstNietzsche, and as I have focused on his middle writings, where much of the mostpertinent thinking takes place, that stance continues to inform my thinking. What’smore, a host of democrats, including Jane Bennett, Judith Butler, Wendy Brown,Daniel Conway, Thomas Dumm, Moira Gatens, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze,Lawrence Hateb, George Kateb, Brian Massumi, Melissa Orlie, Michael Shapiro,Paul Patton, Keith Ansell-Pearson, and Bernard Williams, also draw selective suste-nance from Nietzsche in rethinking the question of democracy without identifyinghim as a democrat. Why would we, in our diverse ways, do so?

The general answer is that many of us think that the ideals ofdemocracy bequeathed by Rousseau, Tocqueville, Mill, Dewey, Rawls, Habermas,and Wolin need reconfiguration today. Nietzsche, even as he excoriates actually ex-isting democracy, is distinctive in the late nineteenth century in fomenting somepertinent ideas. We therefore find ourselves criticizing pivotal themes in Nietzscheeven as he prompts us to rethink settled ideas about democracy. Our relation toNietzsche invites comparison to Marx’s relation to Hegel, Rawls’s relation to Kant,Arendt’s relation to Heidegger, and Wolin’s relation to Arendt. In none of thesecases is the thought of the theorist in question reducible to the thinker from whomthe debt is drawn. But there are nonetheless discernible lines of affiliation that helpto inspire and shape each perspective.

How does this protean thinker contribute distinctive elements tothe nobility of democracy while he himself — after a middle period when he flirtedwith a positive image of a democracy “yet to come” — vigorously disparages it? Sev-eral things may be involved. Nietzsche, still dazzled by an aristocratic imaginary heno longer endorses as historically actualizable, could not purge the odor of demo-cratic mediocrity from his aristocratic nose long enough to explore the positive rela-tion of democracy to some possibilities he does admire. His taste was too rarefied todip into the soup of democratic culture to feel, taste, and smell its nuances and vari-ations. Finally, this protean thinker, prophetic in many ways, was not infinitely so. Heoverlooked a possibility that many coming after him are better able to see: that someof the most noble elements in his own vision have more chance of finding expression

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in a democratic culture today than in any other type. The paradox of Nietzsche isthat the distinctive sensibility through which he opens a door to the ennoblement ofdemocracy is also one that inhibits him from walking through it. The bind in whichhe is caught actually mirrors a less familiar one haunting several contemporary ad-vocates of democracy: their enthusiastic endorsement of the generic idea is joined toa failure to rethink its appropriate form during a time when its spatiotemporal con-ditions of possibility have shifted significantly.

Nietzsche makes significant contributions to the refashioning ofdemocratic thought through the following experiments and explorations:

• In coming to terms with a rift in time and exploring the effectsthat changes in pace and tempo have on the shape and weightof culture

• In challenging the early-modern idea of nature as a lawlikesystem through which culture must be defined, either by sharpcontrast or dull inclusion

• In bringing out hidden elements in the cultural experience ofthe “unequal” and “difference” unavailable to those whocompress those ideas entirely into a hierarchy governed by asingle measure

• In pursuing modes of connection that do not require all theparties to pass through an authoritative center defined either bya nation or by a Christian/Kantian model of the universal

• In exploring those parts of reactive emotion and ethicalresponse that proceed below conscious awareness and the reachof direct self-regulation

• In pursuing an ethic of cultivation or “artistry” that works uponlayers of corporeal judgment below the threshold ofconsciousness

• In pursuing a pathos of distance or noble graciousnessirreducible to either agreement or separation

• In affirming a nontheistic, nonjuridical source of ethicalinspiration even as he comes to terms with the contestability ofsuch a putative source and the tragic character of being

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Of course, each Nietzschean theme must be shaken and reworkedto contribute to a democratic problematic. For he was not a democrat. But that isnot so difficult. Having addressed Nietzsche on the relations among nature, culture,and thinking in chapter 3, I will here explore how Nietzsche’s perspective might in-form democratic thought about the connections among a quick tempo of life, arts ofthe self, and a generous ethos of connection across multiple differences. These areconjunctions that take us to the heart of claims that the tempo of late-modern life isinhospitable to democracy.

What makes it unlikely, to Nietzsche, that a hierarchical, orderedculture of nobility could be rebuilt in the modern age? Several developments arepertinent, but one that he returns to often is the effect the acceleration of pace hason the experience of place and self in modern life. The increase of tempo helps tomake aristocratic culture in the old sense no longer possible. The theme is palpablein this statement from a late book, Twilight of the Idols:

Democracy has always been the declining form of the power to organize. . . .For institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperativewhich is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority,to centuries long responsibility, to solidarity between succeeding generationsbackwards and forwards in infinitum. . . . The entire West has lost those in-stincts out of which institutions grow, out of which the future grows; perhapsnothing goes so much against the grain of its “modern spirit.” One lives fortoday, one lives very fast — one lives very irresponsibly: it is precisely thiswhich one calls “freedom.”9

Lurking within this lamentation is the understanding that a quickpace of life and democracy are interwoven. “One lives for today, one lives very fast.”Also lurking there, however, is a theme important to things Nietzsche himself prizespositively. For speed, up to a point, enables more people to come to terms with howunfinished and full of “gaps” nature is; it encourages them to apply a certain experi-mentalism to themselves periodically; and sometimes it evens supports negotiationof a “spiritualization of enmity” between noble adherents of very different faiths.Indeed, drawing insight from these thoughts in Nietzsche, I will claim that today theaccelerated pace of life, inscribed in public media, military weaponry, Internet com-munications, technological development, cinematic practice, air travel, populationmobility, and cultural exchange, is indispensable to pluralization and democratization.So let’s pull out the aristocratic lamentation in Nietzsche’s characterization. We will

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not forget the limits, dangers, and risks in doing so; we merely set them aside for amoment.

Nietzsche himself paves the way for this strategy in nodule 356of The Gay Science, a book written before his equation between democracy and a“nursemaid” community hardened into cement. In “How Things Will Become EverMore ‘Artistic,’ ” Nietzsche says that in the “Old Europe” of, say, between 800 and1000, the ponderous flow of time encouraged people to sink deeply into their roles.They readily forgot how “accidents, moods and caprice disposed of them,” and theytended to treat what they were culturally defined to be as what they were divinelyand naturally ordained to be. Things change during the opposite ages:

But there are opposite ages, really democratic, where people give up thisfaith, and a certain cocky faith and opposite point of view advance more andmore into the foreground. The individual becomes convinced that he can dojust about everything and can manage almost any role, and everybody experi-ments with himself, improvises, makes new experiments, enjoys his experi-ments; and all nature ceases and becomes art.10

When the pace of life accelerates, nature ceases and becomesart. Inside this exaggeration is an insight. In an up-tempo world people readily be-come more “cocky,” experimental, and improvisational. That is, they become moredemocratic and less fixed and hierarchical. As these improvisations proceed, peoplecan also become more alert to how “accidents, moods and caprice” have alreadyshaped them. The connection between the shift in the experience of nature and theexperience of identity is important, for unless essentially embodied human beingscast off the weight of a teleological experience of nature they are unlikely to come toterms with the element of contingency and fluidity in cultural identity. It is no coin-cidence that the nineteenth-century critic of both teleological and lawlike models ofnature is also an adventurer of the self.

Perhaps Nietzsche constructs a caricature of the premodernworld. Perhaps it was not as slow and fixed as he pretends. Even if so, the caricaturecalls attention to a potential line of affinity flowing through the pace of life, the ex-perience of nature, and the experience of being. As awareness of these connectionsbecomes vivid, people see and feel how some of the habits, prejudgments, and faithsthey embody in, say, religion, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, work, and mode of rulecould be otherwise. They may even become alert to fugitive currents in themselvesflowing in new directions.

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This awareness itself opens up the possibility of improvisationand self-experimentation. It encourages artistic work on those geological layers fromwhich our sensibilities are composed and the ethos of public life is assembled. Per-haps you now work to modify one of your relational identities, seeking to squeezeout a background feeling of “ressentiment” that has infiltrated it. Or perhaps a socialmovement arises that calls into question the transcendental source or civilizationalnecessity of some aspect of your religious faith, sensual affiliation, or social standing.And if you modify the sense of necessity in what you are in one domain, you maynow be prepared to embrace a modest pluralization of identities pursued by others.For you are now no longer so hell-bent on treating culturally entrenched standardsof being as if they reflect ironclad dictates of tradition, nature, and God. You are lessforgetful of the historicity and temporal fluidity of being.

The acceleration of pace does not, of course, guarantee that suchpossibilities will be embraced, or that, if embraced, the experimentation they fomentwill succeed. Nietzsche, as we have seen, resists both the lawlike model of nature anddisembodied conceptions of cultural intersubjectivity. That means he resists boththe project of mastery over nature and the project of complete explanation. Heseeks, rather, to intervene in the world with some efficacy, not to know it in itself ormaster it. Readings of the author of the “will to power” that treat him as a philoso-pher of mastery implicitly project too much of the classical conception of natureinto a perspective that resists it. They overlook the extent to which, on Nietzsche’sreading, “becoming” is built into nature as well as culture, when each aspect of natureis considered over the appropriate time frame.

Such a shift in the tempo of life generates new possibilities, then.It also poses new barriers to the cultural maintenance of innocence about who youare and how you arrived there. When the tempo of life accelerates it now takes morepolitical work to protect the assumption that the identities layered into us conform toa universal model commanded by a god or decreed by nature. That is why so manyqueasy democrats want to slow the world down in the name of democracy. They areworn out by the workload imposed upon them. If you appreciate how nature is dif-ferentially mixed into culture — depending upon the layer of culture in question, andif the element of artistry in nature itself also becomes palpable, you are now in a po-sition to transcend theories that reduce culture to natural regularity and also to breakthe hold of cultural theories that escape stark determinism only by expunging everytrace of nature from the idea of culture. Thus spoke Friedrich Nietzsche.

The acceleration of tempo supports the rise of social movementsfomented by unforeseen shifts of balance between old identities and new conditions.

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And these movements further accentuate the experience of the self as an “actor” whomight “manage almost any role.” In such circumstances it becomes more credible tobalance the politics of recognition against the politics of becoming. The culturallogic of recognition purports to recall things that are there intrinsically but havebeen forgotten, occluded, repressed, or oppressed, while the groan of becoming isthat uncertain process by which new events and identities reconfigure the estab-lished logic of recognition in ways that cannot be captured entirely by tight modelsof explanation or dialectical advance. For the politics of becoming to acquire greatersalience — on the vision pursued here it would be destructive and unjust if it attainedfull reign — the idea of nature as an inherent set of purposes or laws in which we areset would give some ground to appreciation of an element of contingency, surplus,and mutation in the order of nature. Speed, combined with the expanded scope ofcommunication and connection it fosters, can help to promote that shift too, aspeople experience more changes, accidents, surprises, and diversities coming intobeing during their lifetimes. Again, it is not accidental that the nineteenth-centuryphilosopher who raced ahead of his time in thinking about the accelerated tempo oflife was the same one who was prescient in challenging both the Newtonian andHegelian conceptions of nature.

Losses and dangers accompany a significant shift in the tempo oflife. The biggest loss, to Nietzsche at least, is forfeiture of the ability to build a societyof the old sort, the kind of society in which a nobility of the old type could flourish.

For what is dying out is the fundamental faith that would enable us to calcu-late, to promise, to anticipate the future . . . namely, the faith that man hasmeaning only insofar as he is a stone in a great edifice. What will not be builtanymore henceforth, and cannot be built anymore is . . . a society in the oldsense of that word; to build that everything is lacking. Above all the material.All of us are no longer material for a society: this is a truth for which the timehas come.

“All of us are no longer material for a society.” A pivotal mo-ment in the politics of becoming. The most ominous danger when this becomes thecase is that many who resent the uncertain experience of mobility in society andthemselves will press militantly to return political culture to a stonelike condition.And do so in the name of democracy. A demand to exercise unquestioned authorityby claiming to embody in themselves the commands of God, nature, or transcen-dental morality may become militant. Or, perhaps more often, the demand to par-ticipate in the psychic comforts of obedience to fixed commands may intensify. So

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speed can foment the drive to experimentalism and to fundamentalism together. Itsets two contending cultural dispositions into play, redefining the terms of contem-porary politics. For you cannot be a stone unless those around you, whose relationalidentities help to specify how fixed or mobile you are, make up the fixed edifice inwhich you are set. So, again, the condition of possibility for democratic experimental-ism also foments the reactive energies of democratic fundamentalism.

It is fascinating to see how Nietzsche associates the rise of whatmight today be called fundamentalism with the emergence of nihilism, and how heassociates both with the acceleration of speed. Western nihilism, for him, crystallizeswhen belief in the traditional Christian picture of the world falls into crisis and peo-ple nonetheless insist that morality, governance, purpose, and meaning in life arelost unless that world is reinstated. For Nietzsche, who invented the term to applyto exactly this historical configuration, the most promising response to nihilism is toovercome the latter set of demands. It is to accept speed and cultivate new nobilitieswho can live with its effects. For his opponents, it is to return to what the acceler-ated tempo of life makes difficult or impossible to reinstate. “Slow the world down,we want to become stones in an edifice again.”

The futile drive to reinstate the old picture through force andrepression, rather than to forge new values for new circumstances, is the key tomodern nihilism as Nietzsche understands it. Such a drive, while unlikely to succeedin its positive agenda, can certainly foment cultural war. When such negativity pre-vails, one extreme or another will triumph. For “extreme conditions are not succeededby moderate ones but by extreme conditions of the opposite kind.”11 In that regardit is pertinent to listen to the traits of character Nietzsche thinks are most conduciveto negotiation of a world conforming to neither extreme. These traits, representedby him as unusual achievements, are precisely the qualities I find to be most con-ducive to a democratic culture in a fast-paced world. They foster critical responsive-ness to new constituencies seeking to move onto the legitimate register of identity,and they encourage agonistic respect between constituencies already on that registerwho honor diverse moral sources. Nietzsche writes:

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moder-ate; those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who notonly concede but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense; those who canthink of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becomingsmall and weak on that account: those richest in health who are equal tomost misfortunes and therefore not afraid of misfortunes — human beings


who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanitywith conscious pride.12

“Those who do not require any extreme articles of faith.” In thenodule of The Gay Science with which we started, Nietzsche associates the drive toreturn to society in the old sense with the anarchists and socialists of his day. Othersmight select new candidates for that honor today, such as the Christian Right or fer-vent advocates of the nation. Whoever your candidates are, listen to Nietzsche’s ac-count of what they yearn to become:

It is a matter of indifference to me that at present the most myopic, perhapsmost honest, but at any rate noisiest human type that we have today, ourgood socialists, believe, hope, dream, and above all shout and write almostthe opposite. Even now one reads their slogan for the future, “free society.”Free society? Yes, yes! But surely you know, gentlemen, what is required forbuilding that? Wooden iron! The well-known wooden iron. And it must noteven be wooden.

“Wooden iron” is an old German expression for an unbreakablecontradiction. Self-proclaimed democrats who relentlessly pursue a world in whichlife is slow would, through fulfillment of that wish, crush the highest form of freedomto which democracy is connected. They unconsciously project an ideal world in whicheveryone becomes a peasant. In pursuit of stolid role sedimentation, they would de-stroy the actor in the self and, above all, expunge the element of artistry from the ac-tor. By freezing actors into stones, they would expunge the very traits of citizenshipcrucial to a fast-paced world. For it is not going to slow down.

Let there be no mistake. While Nietzsche himself admires theeffect of pace upon the few he thinks can handle it, he resists it for the large major-ity, even though this marginal member of the middle class refuses to define the ma-jority (or “the herd”) by a socially fixed category of class or income. The “herd” isalways an indispensable element in each and all of us, for we need commonalities oflanguage to be. But it becomes overwhelming for those in any sociological categorywho seek to sink into the roles assigned to them. As Nietzsche puts the differencebetween the few and the many, “Man’s greatest labor so far has been to reach agree-ment about very many things and to submit to a law of agreement — regardless ofwhether these things are true or false.”13 This comes most readily when they/weparticipate in a leisurely pace of life, one in which solid conventions become consol-idated into the experience of transcendental truths. Here the many are molded into

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beings of “virtuous stupidity, stolid metronomes for the slow spirit; to make sure thefaithful of the great shared faith stay together and continue their dance.” Only “weothers” — Are you one? Am I? — can rise above such a condition. “We others are theexception and the rule.”14 So Nietzsche, for the seventh time, is not a democrat. Buthe may discern more presciently than many erstwhile democrats the connection be-tween an acceleration of pace and experimentation.

I disagree with Nietzsche about defining a majority as “solidmetronomes” while an exceptional few experiment upon themselves. The hope tofold something like this combination into the democratic state may be the agendagoverning contemporary Straussians. It is governed by a fear of what might happenif too many people lose touch with the traditional boundaries that give them mean-ing and security. But it does not plumb carefully enough the dangers of acting uponthat fear under contemporary conditions, under conditions when circumstances be-yond anyone’s control make the boundaries shaky.

I concur with Nietzsche, then, that a fast pace of life democratizespossibilities he would confine to a few. And that there are risks and dangers attachedto this development. Unlike him and many contemporary conservatives who wouldinsulate most people from the effects of fast tempo, I endorse the democratic possi-bilities supported by such a pace even as I support efforts to temper and qualify someof its most destructive effects. A quick tempo of life, to put it bluntly, sets a crucialcondition of possibility for the vibrant practice of democratic pluralism.

My wager is that it is more possible to negotiate a democraticethos congruent with the accelerated tempo of modern life than it is either to slowthe world down or to insulate the majority of people from the effects of speed. It isimportant to reach a judgment on this issue, for the downside of pace without nego-tiation of a generous ethos is as bleak as its upside is enchanting. And the attempt toslow the world down under contemporary conditions of life is almost certain to de-volve into a search for scapegoats held responsible for the effects of a rapid pace oflife that cannot itself be derailed. What is needed today is at least a large minority ofpeople located in several “subject positions” (such as class, age, gender, ethnicity,faith, region, sensual affiliation) acting as individuals and as constituencies to translatethe positive possibilities of a quick pace of life into a generous ethos of engagement.Of course, a tense balance must be maintained in such an ethos between the claimsof regularity, predictability, and commonality and those of experimentalism, artistry,and becoming.

Let us plumb more closely the risks and costs of trying either toslow the world down or to insulate the majority from the effects of rapid pace upon

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their experience of identity. The contribution a modern capitalist economy makes topace is typically insulated from such cultural wars. For the prospects of slowing cap-italism itself down are dim, and to exempt it from criticism functions to protect the sys-tem of inequalities many defenders of a slow world admire. These devotees of com-munity act as if locality, community, family, neighborhood, and church could beblocked off from the mobilities of capital, labor, travel, fashion, and communication.Such a selective hostility to speed pulls its proponents toward an ugly politics of cul-tural war against those who both lack institutional power and challenge through theirmode of being the claim of traditional constituencies to embody final moral authorityin themselves. That brings us back to the familiar tendency to treat “Gypsies,” “Jews,”“women,” “homosexuals,” “Indians,” “prostitutes,” “welfare freeloaders,” “Blacks,”“atheists,” and “postmodernists” as paradigmatic agents of nomadism, fashion, promis-cuity, style, instability, anchorless amorality, nihilism, or narcissism by those whoboth insulate capitalism from critique and express nostalgia for the long, slow timeof the putative nation. The resentment against speed and the refusal to challenge itsmost salient institutional sources combine to foster such an accusatory culture.

Some proponents of long, slow time actively resist these uglytemptations, and they are to be congratulated for it. Sheldon Wolin is exemplaryhere, except perhaps for the slick equation he sometimes promotes between “post-modernism” and “capitalism.” Others now more carefully select their targets to avoidcountercharges of racism or anti-Semitism.15 But the temptation persists, and manysuccumb to it. So that temptation itself must be included in any calculus of the bestorientation to adopt toward the contemporary nexus between speed and democracy.

Nobility and Grace

Let’s tarry over the positive possibilities of a fast-paced democracy a moment longer.During a time in which people become more like actors, it also becomes more possibleto work on ourselves artistically. We can attempt to modify, adjust, or sublimate de-structive orientations to diversity entrenched in our identities, instincts, and moralcodes. To be an actor is not the highest thing, then. An actor, for instance, might be-come the pawn of arbitrary authority. The actor merely sets a (dangerous) conditionof democratic possibility. Nietzsche is wary of the actor as a self-sufficient type. Buthe and I both admire immensely the possibility of artistry, where people act uponthemselves, thoughtfully, modestly, and experimentally, to “become what they are.”

So you might be an actor without becoming an artist, but youcannot cultivate self-artistry without first stepping onto the stage of the actor.16 Thelanguage through which Nietzsche makes these points uncannily anticipates the

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interplay among film, TV, and the staging of ordinary life so densely developed to-day. The noblest thing is to become more artistic in relation to other constituenciesand to fugitive elements in yourself. Nietzsche thought such artistic experimentscould promote a “spiritualization of enmity” between nobilities of different typesoccupying the same politically organized territory, if and when these projects arejoined to the task of overcoming existential resentment. I call the democratization ofsuch a spirituality between constituencies honoring different moral sources a gener-ous ethos of engagement. Everything most noble about democracy is connected insome way or other to this ability to become a little more artistic in our relations withothers and with diverse parts of ourselves. The acceleration of pace helps to gener-alize that possibility even as it foments risks and dangers to the possibility. Pacethereby sets an ambiguous condition of possibility for a generous ethos of engage-ment in a pluralistic, pluralizing democracy.

I have been appropriating Nietzsche’s thought selectively, aspromised, working on it as we proceed. Let’s turn now to his new conception of no-bility to see how it might be picked over. The old nobility is not possible anymore,as we have seen. So Nietzsche promotes a “new nobility.” He divides the new idealof nobility into three interdependent and dissonant parts.

Those who are noble in the Nietzschean sense, first, work onthemselves to overcome existential resentment against the lack of intrinsic meaningin life (or the uncertainty attached to the judgment that there is such a meaning).The base treat themselves as if they were born to be what chance and power havemade them. The difference between nobility and baseness, again, is not distributedaccording to the usual categories of class, income, or educational level. Anyone mightbe noble, but, according to Nietzsche, most won’t be. “But we, we others who thirstafter reason, are determined to scrutinize our experiences as severely as a scientificexperiment — hour after hour, day after day. We ourselves wish to be our own ex-periments and guinea pigs.”17 To be noble, then, is to be your own experiment andguinea pig, even as you realize — if you follow Nietzsche on this point too — thatmodesty in method and objective is appropriate to the uncertain process of self-ex-perimentation.

But, second, the noble also cultivate a grace and ease of conductbest accomplished through long practice. To be noble is both to be one’s own guineapig and to cultivate grace of self. The first is a condition of the second. But the twodon’t coalesce smoothly. Final harmony between these two interdependent and dis-sonant components cannot be attained, particularly in a world of rapid pace andmore than one nobility.

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The third dimension of Nietzsche’s new nobility is that for anynobility to be it must enter into affirmative relations with other types of nobility.“For many who are noble are needed, and noble men of many kinds, that there maybe a nobility. Or as I once said in a parable: Precisely this is godlike, that there aregods, but no God.”18 This means, when you read it in combination with Nietzsche’scall for a “spiritualization of enmity”19 between noble Christians and non-Christians,that some of the new nobility will accept Nietzsche’s reading of existence while oth-ers will put a God, a transcendental law, or apodictic recognition at the pinnacle ofexperience. But each noble party will respect the fact that its projection is apt to beprofoundly contestable in the eyes of others. The advocates express their existentialfaith, but they also affirm the profound contestability of the “conjecture” they honorthe most.

To democratize the Nietzschean conception of nobility, then, isto generalize the noble ethos he admires. It is to support a multidimensional plural-ism of democratic life irreducible to the national or local pluralisms often associ-ated with democracy; and it is to pursue the possibility of common action in thatnetwork through negotiation of an ethos of engagement between constituencieswho fold into their relational identities the three qualities Nietzsche associates withthe new nobility. The dissonant interdependence among these three elements — self-experimentalism, grace, and plurality — is precisely the condition of being appropri-ate to democracy in a fast-paced world. So let’s think further about how grace is cul-tivated, according to Nietzsche, and what connection its cultivation has to a nobledemocratic ethos in which appreciation of plurality reigns.

The cultivation of grace involves not only direct intellectual self-regulation but also tactics or artistry applied by the self to corporeal layers of beingnot sufficiently susceptible to direct conscious control. “For to say it once more”:

Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it: the think-ing that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this — the mostsuperficial and worst — for only this conscious thinking takes the form of words,which is to say signs of communication. . . . The emergence of our sense impres-sions into our consciousness, the ability to fix them, and, as it were, exhibitthem externally, increased proportionally with the need to communicatethem to others by means of signs.20

In the nodule from which this statement is drawn Nietzsche tendsto equate the difference between conscious and nonconscious thinking with that be-tween general cultural orientations and thought-imbued intensities unique to each

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individual. At other times, however, he sees how cultural intersubjectivity itself be-comes mixed into corporeal habits through affectional ties, general patterns of repe-tition, and collective techniques of punishment. We now encounter formulationssuch as “states of consciousness, beliefs of any kind, holding something to be true,for example — every psychologist knows this — are a matter of complete indifferenceand fifth rank compared to the value of the instincts”; and “our true experiences arenot garrulous”; and “our invisible moral qualities follow their own course — proba-bly a whole different course; and they might give pleasure to a god with a divine mi-croscope.”21

Both noble arts of the self and negotiation of a democratic ethosof agonistic respect among diverse constituencies depend upon making distinctiveimplantations in those “concealed plantings and gardens” that precede consciousness,influence conduct independent of it, and exert some influence over conscious reflec-tion. That is why Nietzsche both resists those who would eliminate social rituals inthe name of a more rational secularism and opposes those who would give any churchmonopoly over ritual. For ritual is a generalization of arts of the self. And the culti-vation of nobility cannot be attained by intellectual argument and acts of will alone.Argument, deliberation, and stories, while pertinent to self-cultivation, are not suf-ficient to them. The self, rather, nudges the organization of its own proto-thinking,mood, and prejudgment by artful means. As we have seen in previous chapters, thegeneralization of such arts, and the negotiation of a generous ethos between con-stituencies who honor different ethical sources, forms the micropolitical dimensionof life in a pluralist culture.

How do such arts proceed? It depends upon the issue and thecontext. That’s why it is most pertinent to discuss relational techniques of the selfcase by case.22 We isolated in chapter 3 a few techniques by which one already temptedby the Nietzschean image of thinking might come to embrace it more actively; weexplored techniques to spur creativity in thinking in chapter 4; and I have discussedsuch tactics with respect to one’s orientation to criminal punishment, doctor-assistedsuicide, and same-sex marriage in other studies. Here is an example that is particu-larly relevant to the issues posed in this chapter.

Suppose you find yourself attached to either a linear or teleolog-ical image of time, even while a series of events increasingly presses you to call thatimage into question. Part of you insists that a viable concept of causality and a reli-able concept of morality depend upon this image. Moreover, a sense of anxiety surgesup when it is called into question. Perhaps it is connected to your faith in a salvationalGod or to the sense that life is meaningless unless the possibility of steady progress


is projected forward. On the other hand, you’ve been around for a while, and you recallseveral instances in which either your projection into the future or your establishedjudgment of conduct was thrown into crisis by unexpected events or new movementsin the politics of becoming. You have reached the point where you suspect that it isunethical to accept without complication the linear concept of time bound to yourcurrent vision of causality and morality. How to proceed now?

The first thing, perhaps, is to rehearse this autobiographical his-tory of disconcerting events more closely. They may include the rise of a feministmovement, the emergence of a gay rights movement, the unexpected collapse of theSoviet Union, the unexpected upsurge of religious fundamentalism, and the birth ofa movement in support of doctor-assisted suicide. The point now is to review theevents that surprised and unsettled you initially, trying to bracket the interpretiveand/or ethical adjustments you later made in response to them. Each such event, ofcourse, might have been incorporated later into your understanding, because you area smart dialectician. In fact, it is difficult not to do so, since subtraction and forgettingare closely bound up with organization of memory. But now you suspect that thisvery dialectical skill encourages you to forget the agonizing and intensive work youactually did on your explanatory projections and moral sensibility to adjust to newand initially surprising conditions. Moreover, this very forgetfulness may render youless prepared than otherwise to respond reflectively to the next set of surprises. Younow suspect that history is intrinsically replete with surprise, and that your implicitimage of time operates as a screen to protect you from this disturbing realization.Sure, you will unavoidably continue to project things forward on the basis of estab-lished understandings and to judge them according to the best recipes heretofore fash-ioned. But now you try to build into that very sensibility another dimension disso-nant with it, one that affirms the probability that some of the very projections youmake will be disturbed, unsettled, or overthrown at unexpected moments. FollowingBergson’s account of how operational perception promotes a linear image of time,you now strive to build into your sensibility a second-order appreciation to correctthe first impression. For the first image, while useful and ethically laudable much of thetime, may also conceal something that needs to be drawn into your thinking. Spinozarecommended something akin to this in the seventeenth century, when people wereadjusting to the idea that the phenomenological experience of the sun revolvingaround the earth was at odds with second-order evidence that the earth revolvesaround the sun. He thought that once you absorbed the second-order understanding,the initial phenomenological experience would both persist and be infused by self-corrective tendencies.

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After such a series of rehearsals it might now be possible to con-solidate more deeply the idea that time is out of joint. Deleuze, as we saw in chapter4, reviews in Cinema 2: The Time-Image a series of films that convey this secondimage of time more vividly. Another film that does so is Stranger Than Paradise, byJim Jarmusch. One remarkable thing about that film, as noted briefly in chapter 5, isthe irrational cuts between scenes, joined to a bracing musical score that links themin mood and temper. We are first treated to a scene in which a series of connectedevents unfolds; then to a blank, black screen for a few seconds; and then every nowand then to a new scene that neither we nor the actors could have anticipated. Wemight retrospectively make sense of this break, at least to some degree. It is this ret-rospective power that provides the crooked line of continuity connecting the scenestogether. But we could not predict the turn prior to its occurrence.

Exposure to the repetition of such irrational cuts can work uponyour subliminal experience of time, if you have now reached a point where you arereceptive to such work. You now sense more vividly that below the threshold of at-tention things go on too small and fast to know, but cumulatively effective enoughto issue in surprising twists and turns in time. It is hubristic to think that you couldcapture all these elements in the detail and depth needed in the course of living, andit is possible that some of those elements lack the shape or structure amenable to fullintellectual capture in principle. As this latter sense sinks into your sensibility, youmay gradually find yourself projecting an orientation to meaning and ethics that af-firms a rift in time as an intrinsic part of them. You begin to experience meaning lessas something to be discovered and more as an investment you make in selective ac-tivities and events. Now the attainment of meaning and a rift in time become inter-meshed. And that part of freedom that is tied to becoming may now appear closelybound up to a rift in time too. Soon, rather than treating the rift in the moment as acrisis in the fabric of causality, meaning, and morality, you have begun to see howeach, after appropriate revision, becomes intermeshed with the others. We started tothink about the relevant idea of causality in chapter 2, and we will pursue further theconnection between ethics and the rift of time in the next chapter.

After a series of such reflections and interventions, you mightnow be moved to consider in a more receptive mood the conceptions of nature devel-oped by Epicurus, Lucretius, Nietzsche, Prigogine, Stengers, and Stephen Gould,for their images of nature are congruent with a rift in time in history.

What is initially treated as a set of intellectual themes to explorecan next be translated into a series of experimental interventions into the characterof your sensibility. This is the translation process through which the compositional

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dimension of thinking comes into its own, although it is always at work in the back-ground. Suppose, after all this, you watch Stranger Than Paradise again, primingyourself this time to let your dream life enter more actively into the picture. You re-view the issues before going to sleep, thinking, too, about how you have already begunto translate the intellectual issues into experimental strategies of self-composition.According to some researchers on sleep, it takes both deep, slow wave sleep andrapid eye movement (REM) sleep to consolidate new experience. “During the firsttwo hours of slow-wave sleep . . . certain brain chemicals plummet and informationflows out of the memory region called the hippocampus and into the cortex.” Then,“during the next four hours,” the brain engages in a kind of internal dialogue “thatdistributes this new information into the appropriate networks and categories.” Fi-nally, in the last two hours, “brain chemistry and activity again change drastically asthe cortex goes into an active dreaming state.” The cortex now “re-enacts the train-ing and solidifies the newly made connections throughout its memory banks.”23

After several such bouts of synthesis or “processing,” you may move closer to thedouble experience of time initially projected intellectually. It finds expression in theoccasions and tone of your laughter, and in a readiness to draw upon an ethical reserveof generosity exceeding the dictates of your official doctrine when you encounternew twists and turns in time.

You thus participate, repetitively and experimentally, in a series ofintercoded activities that impinge upon the self at several levels, allowing a mixtureof images, gestures, rhythms, memories, arguments, and ethical concerns to becomefolded into your sensibility. You do so to recode modestly your experience of timeand the ways that experience is now joined to modified ideas of meaning, ethics, andcausality. If the double image of time begins to take, the possibility to work furtheron the relevant images of meaning, ethics, and causality has also become enhanced.

Such strategies might be adapted to work on your preliminaryorientation to border politics in the American Southwest, or to engage religious orirreligious faiths that challenge your presumption to monopolize the final source ofmorality, or to reconfigure modestly any number of dispositions disturbed by theemergence of a new movement sowing uncertainty or panic in this or that aspect ofyour identity.

If and as the background feeling of anxiety diminishes, new andmore generous thoughts, images, feelings, and judgments might become available,emerging as if from nowhere into the conscious register of thought, perception, andjudgment. If some of these filter into your dream life, more work yet may be accom-plished on the lower layers of subjectivity. In Nietzsche’s more grandiose language,

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those artists of the self who “give style” to their character “survey all the strengthsand weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every oneof them appears as art and reason. . . . Here a large mass of second nature has beenadded; there a piece of original nature has been removed — both times through longpractice and daily work at it.”24

Nietzsche, again, contests the secular ideal in which the admirablerefusal to make a single orientation to God the defining mark of a whole politicalregime is joined to the less thoughtful relegation of ritual and arts to churches in theprivate realm. Too many secularists slide over or denigrate those culturally mediatedlayers of unconscious corporeality that flow into consciousness without being underits complete governance. For to embrace pluralism is to tap into depths beyond theshallow waters of secular intellectualism.

The key, as Nietzsche himself makes clear in the nodule in ques-tion, is that those who practice such arts “attain satisfaction” with themselves. Hisidea of satisfaction is not reducible to that calculus of uncultivated pleasure valorizedin some versions of British utilitarianism. For such a feeling could be set in an under-lying mood of resentment against the lack of intrinsic purpose in the world. It, rather,involves an enhanced feeling for existence, a “gratitude” for the abundance of lifethat many people, if and when they are fortunate, are already inhabited by to somedegree. Nietzsche’s idea of satisfaction is actually closer to the Buddhist sense of“the ultimate nature of awareness,” and “fathomless well spring of intuitive wisdom,compassion and power” attained through arts of meditation than to a utilitarian cal-culus of pleasure, although his emphasis on maintaining dissonance among activism,experimentalism, and grace may not mesh entirely with the corollary balance inBuddhism.25 The feeling for existence Nietzsche seeks to amplify through self-artistryalso touches those “background feelings” that Antonio Damasio addresses in hisstudy of the neurophysiology of affective thought. Such a sense gives tone to a life.“A background feeling is not what we feel when we jump out of our skin for sheerjoy, or when we are despondent over lost love. . . . A background feeling correspondsinstead to the body state prevailing between emotions. [It] is our image of the bodylandscape when it is not shaken by emotion.”26 It is the affirmation of existence thatNietzschean arts seek to fold into the background of being. The goal is to fold a vis-ceral affirmation of life more robustly into being, even as you understand that disasteror misfortune might overcome it at some point. Nietzsche, the modern Sophocles,thereby tracks several religions in their appreciation of ritual, music, and rhythm inspiritual life, but he does so without himself adopting a theology of transcendence.The close connection between enhancement of the feeling for existence and a gen-

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erous ethical sensibility surfaces in the following formulation. It is crucial that a “hu-man being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this orthat poetry or art. . . . Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for re-venge, and we others will be his victims.”27

It is pertinent to underline again that this advocate of “nobilityof many kinds” and “the spiritualization of enmity” does not demand that every noblepractice of artistry endorse the same fundamental interpretation of being he himselfembraces. While he contests many who endorse, say, Christian love, Buddhist com-passion, Judaic responsibility to a nameless divinity, or the Kantian presumption ofpure practical reason, Nietzsche at his best — which is often enough — seeks to es-tablish noble relations of agonistic respect between the carriers of such alternativefaiths, as participants in each come to terms with the contestability of their fundamen-tal faith in an affirmative rather than resentful way. That’s one reason Nietzsche re-spected Jesus, even while dissenting from him. For Jesus, too, seeks to overcome exis-tential resentment. Arts of the self, as Nietzsche presents them, both move in theregion of religious ritual and aim at installing reciprocal appreciation of the con-testability of different fundamental interpretations of being. The time of the old no-bility, where one tradition secures its authority on the same territory, has passed, if itever existed. That’s why this defender of nobility as “nobility of many kinds” calls hismost fundamental orientation a “conjecture.”

But you may still contest elements in my reading of Nietzsche.No matter. Let me gather a few together, fold them into a vision of democratic plu-ralism, and put the result in my own voice, so the issue will be clear. In my render-ing, arts of the self and micropolitics can help pluralistic democrats residing on thesame territory affirm without existential resentment the profound contestability ofthe existential faith each honors the most, whether it has at its pinnacle a designinggod, a voluntarist god, a loving god, a commanding god, an inscrutable, unnameabledivinity, the emptiness of being, a moral god as a subjective postulate, or an abundant,opaque, mobile world without a god. Such an orientation goes beyond the intellec-tualism of liberal tolerance precisely in the way it links artistry to the layering ofpresumptive generosity into visceral dimensions of the self and the materialities ofcultural life; and it stretches liberal tolerance precisely to the degree it extends “crit-ical responsiveness” (as I call it) not merely to already existing identities but to thepolitics of becoming by which new constituencies periodically surge into being froman opaque netherworld of difference, injury, and energy.

We have seen how arts of the self work for Nietzsche and towhat layers of being they might apply. What, more closely, is the relation between

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self-artistry and a noble ethic for him in his middle writings? “Most of us,” Nietzschesays, “are our whole lives long the fools of the way we acquired in childhood of judg-ing our neighbors (their minds, rank, morality. . .) and of finding it necessary to payhomage to their evaluations.” The absolutization of childhood judgments by priests,parents, politicians, political theorists, and philosophers further insulates these codesfrom ethical work. Ethics, as Nietzsche understands it, is intimately bound up withthe work adults do on themselves to reconfigure crude childhood codes received aslaws and to reconsider the intrinsic authority in which those codes are said to be an-chored. He contends that we “have to learn to think differently — in order at last, per-haps, very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.”28 Arts of the self are thusbonded to the project of folding nobility and grace into cultural relations betweendifferent faiths in the same regime. The main difference between Nietzsche and meis that he thinks it best to reserve this effort for a small set of freethinkers, while Ithink the compression of distance by the acceleration of pace makes it wise to pursueit among a large number of citizens in a variety of subject positions.

Nietzsche thought that morality in Christendom, as the latterwas transformed by Paul following the death of Jesus, encourages people to imposerigid restraints on others and their own potential selves. Democracy, for him, com-pounds the problem. There is evidence to support his judgment, in the long historyof Christian orientations to paganism, heresy, schism, science, inquisitions, the NewWorld, Judaism, atheism, homosexuality, and women. But there are also importantdevelopments that press against that judgment. Above all, the post-World War IIperiod has seen a significant development toward deepening and extending plural-ism. The European Holocaust against Jews fomented a profound rethinking. Andgeneral changes in the pace and scope of public culture expose more Christians thanNietzsche ever anticipated to the experience of historical contingency in aspects oftheir religious identities and to the reasonable contestability in the eyes of others oftheir most fundamental beliefs. Although the issue is still very much in doubt, alarger number of Christian/secular democrats today cultivate dispositions in favor ofmultidimensional pluralism than Nietzsche ever allowed himself to imagine. Duringa time when things move faster than heretofore, the nobility Nietzsche admired athis best finds its most active expression in a democratic culture. For, although therecan be no guarantees in this domain, democracy, speed, plurality, and a graceful ethosof engagement set preliminary conditions of possibility for each other.

Since Nietzsche did not explore the ennoblement of democracy,he did not appreciate, either, how much its ennoblement involves the reduction ofinequalities in income, educational opportunity, and participation in governing. The

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noble philosopher of becoming, further, overlooked the democratic politics of becomingby which new events, identities, faiths, and conditions are ushered into being. Thatis why the philosopher of speed, the gateway, arts of the self, the cultivation of grace,and nobility as multiple nobilities both advances themes pertinent to a pluralizationof grace and requires transfiguration by democrats who stand in a relation of ago-nistic indebtedness to him.

Over the past fifteen years or so, I have sought to valorize produc-tive tension in democratic life between, on one side, being, recognition, predictabil-ity, rights, governance, and tolerance and, on the other, disturbance, becoming, crit-ical responsiveness to the surge of the new, and a generous ethos of engagementbetween constituencies honoring different final sources. The torsion between thesetwo forces constitutes, for me, the key to democratic pluralism. The ideas of the lay-ering of culture, a rift in time, an ethic of cultivation, nontheistic gratitude, deepcontestability, the politics of becoming, agonistic respect, critical responsiveness,studied indifference, multidimensional pluralism, and an ethos of engagement speakto a fast-paced world in which care for the protean diversity of life already has someexistential foothold and no transcendental or nontranscendental source of morality issusceptible to universal recognition. The drive is to nourish an intracultural ethoscapable of democratic governance between interdependent partisans honoring dif-ferent moral sources. Each of these ideas, in turn, draws part of its inspiration froma distinctive theme in Nietzsche. His aristocratic presentations of the dissonant con-junction of the moment, a pathos of distance, nobility as multiple nobilities, beingone’s own guinea pig, the unequal as difference exceeding a single authoritative mea-sure, modesty as strength, the immorality of morality, the creativity of nature, ethicsas artistry, and the spiritualization of enmity provide fertile ground for plagiarizationand transfiguration by those who treat democracy as the crucial cultural formationthrough which to sustain torsion between being and becoming. It can be left to theacademic police to decide whether my transfigurations depart too far from Nietzscheas they understand him. The significant question is whether the complex can standon its own as a network of dispositions and practices appropriate to democracy in afast-paced world. That one remains open.

Let’s note in closing a moment in Nietzsche’s thought when heexperimented briefly with some of the positive possibilities in democracy pursuedhere:

Democracy wants to create and guarantee as much independence as possible:independence of opinion, of mode of life and of employment. . . . For the

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three great enemies of independence . . . are the indigent, the rich and theparties. I am speaking of democracy as something to come.29

Nietzsche, like Wolin after him, speaks here of a connection between equality andindependence in democracy, with each needing the other to develop. Like Wolintoo, he focuses on democracy not as something that is, but as “something yet tocome.” The fragility of democracy and the element of becoming in it. To the extenta vision of democracy supports tension between the weight of existing plurality andthe politics of pluralization, to that extent it is pertinent to think with and againstthe nineteenth-century philosopher of becoming, nontheistic gratitude, nobility, grace,and a rift in time.

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The Ambiguity of Speed

sheldon wolin seeks to save local democracy by slowing down time. Paul Viriliolifts the issue of speed into the ether of global politics itself. It would be difficult tooverstate the importance of Virilio to exploration of the effects of speed upon thelate-modern condition. Everybody who engages the issue is indebted to him, evenwhen they disagree with him profoundly. When speed accelerates, Virilio says, spaceis compressed. And everything else changes too: the ability to deliberate before go-ing to war; the priority of civilian control over the military; the integrity of the ter-ritorial politics of place; the capacity to think with concepts in relation to images;the ability to escape the eye of surveillance; and so on and on. Not only does Viriliochart the multiple effects of speed, he develops an arresting vocabulary to fix theseeffects in our minds: the war machine, the unspecified enemy, the nonplace of speed,the negation of space, the perpetual state of emergency, the miniaturization of action,the disappearance of the present, and the integral accident. These pithy formulationsencapsulate in their brevity the compression of time they represent, giving us a dou-ble dose of the phenomenon Virilio warns against.

And the danger is great. Little doubt about that. If you treat thewar machine as the paradigm of speed, as Virilio does, it seems that sometime duringthe 1960s the ability to deliberate democratically about military action was jeopardized

Eccentric Flows and Cosmopolitan

Culture

by the imperative to automatize split-second responses to preemptive strikes a minuteor less away from their targets. My concern, nonetheless, is that Virilio allows the mil-itary paradigm to overwhelm all other modalities and experiences of speed. Virilioremains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role ofspeed in intrastate democracy and cross-state cosmopolitanism. He underplays thepositive role speed can play in ventilating dogmatic identities in the domains of reli-gion, sensuality, ethnicity, gender, and nationality. And he remains so sunk in thememory of the territorial nation as the place of democratic deliberation that he tooquickly dismisses the productive possibilities (I do not say probabilities) of cosmopoli-tanism in the late-modern time.

Let’s listen to some moves in Virilio’s presentation of the corre-spondences between speed, temporality, territory, democratic deliberation, nation-hood, and belonging.

The speed of the political decision depends on the sophistication of the vec-tors: how to transport the bomb? how fast? The bomb is political . . . not be-cause of an explosion that should never happen, but because it is the ultimateform of political surveillance.

Social conflicts arise from rivalries between those who occupy and preservean eco-system as the place that specifies them as a family or group, and thattherefore deserves every sacrifice, including sudden death. For “if to be is toinhabit,’ not to inhabit is no longer to exist. Sudden death is preferable tothe slow death . . . of the man deprived of a specific place and thus of his identity.

Contraction in time, the disappearance of the territorial space, after that ofthe fortified city and armor, leads to a situation in which the notions of “be-fore” and “after” designate only the future and the past in a form of war thatcauses the “present” to disappear in the instantaneousness of decision.

“Unlike cinema,” Hitchcock said, “with television there is no time for suspense,you can only have surprise.” This is . . . the paradoxical logic of the videoframewhich privileges the accident, the surprise, over the durable substance ofthe message.

In the first instance, it [war] involves the elimination of the appearance of thefacts, the continuation of what Kipling meant when he said: “Truth is the firstcasualty of war.” Here again it is less a matter of introducing some maneuver. . .than with the obliteration of the very principle of truth. Moral relativism hasalways been offensive, from time immemorial.

The more speed increases the faster freedom decreases.1

E c c e n t r i c F l o w s a n d C o s m o p o l i t a n C u l t u r e

But what if, as I began to argue in the last chapter, the compres-sion of distance through speed has some of the effects Virilio records while it alsosupports the possibility of democratic pluralization within states and the periodicemergence of citizen cosmopolitanism across states speaking affirmatively to issuesof ecology, peace, indigenous minorities, the legitimation of new identities and rights,and the better protection of old rights? Then acceleration would carry positive pos-sibilities as well as dangers. And a single-minded attack on its dangers would forfeitaccess to its positive possibilities. Let me, then, summarize my contentions:

• The contemporary accentuation of tempo in interterritorialcommunications, entertainment, tourism, trade, and populationmigration exposes more constituencies more actively to thecomparative particularity and contestability of faiths andidentities they may heretofore have taken to be universal orincontestable.

• The accentuated pace in the experiences of accident,innovation, and surprise, listed by Virilio only as a destructiveeffect of speed, can also function over time to disrupt closedmodels of nature, truth, and morality into which people soreadily become encapsulated, doing so in ways that supportrevisions in the classical paradigms of science and more activeappreciation of positive possibilities in the politics of becomingby which new identities and rights are engendered.

• Virilio’s identification of the territorial nation as repository ofdemocratic unity and of slow pace as the temporal condition ofnational deliberation deprecates pursuit of a more expansiveethos of multidimensional pluralism that speaks to diversities,both submerged and visible, already extant on most politicallyorganized territories.

Speed is dangerous. A military culture organized around missilesaccentuates danger and compresses the time in which to respond to it. At a certainpoint of acceleration speed in other domains also jeopardizes freedom and shortensthe time in which to engage ecological issues. But, as already suggested in the lastchapter, the crawl of slow time contains significant injuries, dangers, and repressivetendencies too. Speed is therefore profoundly ambiguous. The positive possibilities

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in this ambiguity are lost to those who experience its effects only through nostalgiafor a fictive time when a slow pace, the centered nation, the security of eternal truth,the experience of nature as purposive organism or set of timeless laws, and the solid-ity of thick moral universals governed experience of the world and enabled demo-cratic deliberation.

Today, ironically, the most virulent attempts to slow things downnow take the form of national and religious fundamentalisms that deploy mediasound bites and military campaigns of ethnic cleansing to return to a slow, centeredworld. Indeed, the ambiguity of speed finds its most salient manifestation in theparadoxical contest taking place in our souls, our states, and our interstate actionsbetween the pluralization of public cultures and their fundamentalization. Funda-mentalism is the shape the desire for a slow, centered world takes when its temporalconditions of possibility are absent. The drives to pluralize and to fundamentalizeculture form, therefore, two contending responses to late-modern acceleration. Eachpropensity intensifies under the same temporal conditions. And that struggle goeson within us as well as between us. As that contest proceeds it also becomes clear whydemocratic pluralists must embrace the positive potentialities of speed while work-ing to attenuate its most dangerous effects. We explored these issues in chapter 6primarily within the compass of the territorial state. We turn now to that dimensionof citizen politics that reaches across states.

Kant and Cosmopolitanism

When Kant penned his great essays on universal peace and cosmopolitanism in the1780s and 1790s, clocks did not have second hands; it took a week to set the printfor a newspaper run, weeks to travel across Europe, months to sail across the Atlantic,longer yet to sail around the world. European engagements with people, religions,and languages in Asia and Africa were circumscribed by the slow media of travel andcommunication in which they were set. Such a pace of life may show itself in Kant’sracial hierarchy of civilizations, with Europe at the top and Africa at the bottom; itmay also find expression in his judgment that only Christianity is truly a moral reli-gion and that the morality applicable to the entire world finds its deepest spiritualanchor in Christianity.2

Kant’s genius finds expression in his quest for a cosmopolitanismthat rises above the particularity of a single nation; but the limits of that cosmopoli-tanism are bound to the temporal assumptions in which it is contained. That cos-mopolitanism, as we shall see, gains a grip in Kant’s moral imagination only becauseit flows from a transcendental imperative to act as if the world were filled with a

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providential direction that stretches beyond the reach of human agency. Kant’s moraltranscendentalism enables cosmopolitanism to function as a regulative ideal in histime. But the form that transcendentalism is constrained to assume also folds an ele-ment of European superiority and dogmatism into cosmopolitanism.

What, exactly, is the relation between Kant’s image of universalmorality and his injunction to cosmopolitanism? Morality, according to the famousKantian dictum, takes the form of a categorical imperative that applies universally.He devises simple tests to help people decide when a candidate for moral law passesmuster. But prior to those tests, making them possible and necessary, is the insistentidea that morality itself takes the form of a law binding on everyone. How does Kantknow this to be so? How does he conclude so authoritatively that diverse theorists ofethics in Europe such as Epicurus, Lucretius, Spinoza, Montaigne, and Hume, aswell as vast numbers of people outside Europe adopting other sources of ethical in-spiration, are mistaken in deviating from this fundamental dictum? He does not, heacknowledges, know it. He cannot, he agrees, prove this fundamental dimension ofhis theory by any argument. Rather, Kant treats this categorical judgment about thevery form of morality itself as a fundamental recognition always already achieved byevery ordinary person who has not been confounded by individual perversity orthrown astray by the dictates of an underdeveloped civilization.

Kant’s critique of pure reason in the domains of explanation andunderstanding does set limits beyond which understanding and “speculative” reasoncannot proceed. These are limits to which contemporary realists, neorealists, rational-choice theorists, and empiricists would have to conform if they abided by the Kantiandictates of modesty in explanation. But morality, as practical reason — that is, as non-theoretical reason — is pure and unmediated. Here is how Kant distinguishes the two:

For whatever needs to draw the evidence of its reality from experience mustdepend for the ground of its possibility on principles of experience; by itsvery notion, however, pure practical reason cannot be held to be dependent in thisway. Moreover, the moral law is given, as an apodictically certain fact, as itwere, of pure reason. . . . Thus the objective reality of the moral law can beproved through no deduction, through no exertion of the theoretical, specu-lative, or empirically supported reason; and even if one were willing to re-nounce its apodictic certainty, it could not be confirmed by any experienceand thus proved a posteriori. Nevertheless, it is firmly established of itself.3

The fundamental character of morality is not known by concep-tual reasoning; it is recognized apodictically. And all of Kant’s characteristic strictures

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about the moral effect of publicity, the proper role of philosophy in the university, moralenlightenment, universal history, perpetual peace, and cosmopolitanism reflect the practicalimplications of the apodictic recognition that precedes, enables, and requires them.These ideas are not forms of knowledge but (variously) postulates, hopes, and dutifulprojections that follow from apodictic recognition of the proper form of morality. Aswe shall see through Kant’s encounter with Spinoza, however, these postulates andas if injunctions also function secondarily as props to the very recognition thatgrounds them. For if the postulate/props were pulled away, the initial, apodicticrecognition of morality as law would begin to unravel too. How solid and universal,then, is the linchpin? How solid or fragile is apodictic recognition?

The cultural attainment of Kantian recognition may depend inpart on the tempo of life in which it is pursued. I want to suggest, at any rate, thatthe steadfastness and generality of Kantian recognition is even more difficult to sustaintoday than it was in Kant’s time. And it faced difficulties then. As distance betweenplaces becomes abridged and plurality within each becomes enhanced, what appearsin Kantian philosophy as an unavoidable moment of universal recognition increas-ingly becomes a critical site of cultural contestation. Today, the Kantian recognitionof the constitutive form of morality is endorsed fervently by some, rejected intenselyby others, ignored by many, and strained through a vague sense of uncertainty by yetothers. It can be confessed as a contestable act of faith; it might even be imposedthrough cultural war as the official judgment of an entire country or even civiliza-tion. But it cannot be shown without doubt to function, as Kant thought it must, asan apodictic, spontaneous basis of morality achieved prior to moral argument andcultural induction.

Moreover, it never was all that secure. The Kantian model ofrecognition carried with it the translation of the Christian God heretofore confesseddirectly and “dogmatically” (as he put it) into a necessary subjective postulate ofmorality. Both the model of recognition and the demotion of the God were criti-cized in Kant’s time by those who confessed direct obedience and devotion to a lov-ing/commanding God and, although in much smaller numbers, by others who sup-ported a nontheistic ethic of cultivation over the command and teleological modelsset in the theological tradition. Kant got into trouble with ecclesiastical and state au-thorities for giving morality priority over ecclesiology. But he joined them in casti-gating and marginalizing others who adopted an ethic of cultivation that did notplace a god either at the highest site of command or as the implication of a necessarymorality of command. Kantian cosmopolitanism cannot tolerate plural sources ofmorality.

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If apodictic recognition — as the linchpin of Kantian morality —is even more contestable and contested today, this shift in its status throws intoquestion the model of cosmopolitanism derived from it. It does so, moreover, in atime when the need for a cosmopolitan dimension of politics is greater than ever.Let’s look more closely, then, at the connection between his conception of moralityand his model of cosmopolitanism. Both “realism” and “idealism,” as defined incontemporary international relations theory, find places within the Kantian system.If Kant had accepted “theoretical reason” but scrapped “pure practical reason,” forinstance, he might be a realist of the most uncompromising sort.4 He would discernno sign of progress in history; he would counsel states to be governed by narrowself-interest; he would predict an endless series of wars and other catastrophes. His-tory would appear to Kant as “an aimlessly playing nature” in which “hopeless chance”governs.5

The undeniable integrity of practical reason changes things. Itdemands, despite what actual history may teach, that we act as if nature and historyare intelligible. It suggests, further, that we act as if there is a guiding thread in his-tory that pulls us, beyond the reach of effective human agency, toward a cosmopoli-tan world in which peace between nations can prevail. Practical reason tells us to“assume” that an “idea” of progress operates within the ugly empirical history of warand commerce; it tells us to “regard” history and nature as “providential”; it enablesus to “hope” that the dictates of the moral will might be aided in the individual bygrace and in collective life by a providence that exceeds the possible reach of humanagency. Here is a formulation expressing the idea:

I will thus permit myself to assume that since the human race’s natural end isto make steady cultural progress, its moral end is to be conceived as progress-ing toward the better. And this progress may occasionally be interrupted, butit will never be broken off. It is not necessary for me to prove this assumption;the burden of proof is on its opponents. For I rest my case on my innateduty. . .—the duty so to affect posterity that it will become continually bet-ter (something that must be assumed to be possible).6

The “innate duty” to cosmopolitanism, the practical assumptionof its possibility, and the idea of providence in nature and history all flow from thesame slender reed of apodictic recognition at the base of Kantian morality. That iswhy Kant says — to the realist in others and in himself — that “empirical argumentsagainst the success of these resolutions, which are based on hope, fail here.”7 Interna-tional relations theorists who criticize Kantian cosmopolitanism on empirical grounds

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miss this point. They address the historical probability of cosmopolitan efficacy, notthe moral necessity to act as if it were possible and could become efficacious.

It is clear to Kant that human agency by itself is radically insuffi-cient to realize the cosmopolitan idea in his time. The slow pace of history helpsKant to adopt a subjective postulate of providence to supersede the reach of humanagency. So the Kantian trust in providence in the otherwise uncertain flow of com-merce, wars, migrations, and natural disasters speaks to “what human nature does inand with us so as to compel us to a path that we ourselves would not readily follow.”But the assumption of providence itself flows in part from a disjunction between thehistorical fact that “while men’s ideas [Ideen] can extend to the whole as such, their in-fluence cannot, not just because it is too vast for them, but primarily because it wouldbe difficult for them to freely unify their conflicting plans into a single purpose.”8

Kant projected dramatic possibilities into the future as he soughtto find signs in history of the progress he was obligated to project into it. He projectedan “unbroken” historical progress promoted by the beneficent effects of “patholog-ical” wars, the extension of gentleness in commerce, and the gradual cultivation of ahigher moral culture by these and other pathological means. But he did not antici-pate — nor could he be expected to have done so — the late-modern compression ofglobal distance, the tightening of global interdependencies and inequalities, the ac-centuation of diversity on politically organized territories and the multiplication ofglobal dangers through the acceleration of speed in military delivery systems, com-munication networks, production processes, commercial activity, cross-territorialmigrations, refugee movements, tourism, disease transmission, criminal networks,ecological effects, drug trade, interstate social movements, nuclear danger, and cli-matic change. Had he done so, he might have sensed how the apodictic recognitionof morality he took to be implicit in every normal person and every culture could be challenged through an intensification of intraterritorial pluralization and cross-territorial compression. And he might have seen how the gap between the scope ofpossible agency and the aspiration to cosmopolitanism could close somewhat throughspeed.

Today the specific terms of that cosmopolitanism have not onlybecome even more contestable, they continue to carry within them elements of adogmatic Western imperialism still in need of reconstruction. One key, in my judg-ment, is to relinquish the demand that all reasonable people in all cultures must ac-tually or implicitly recognize the logic of morality in the same way Kant did. Oreven as neo-Kantian universalists do.9 Once this pivot of Kantian morality is trans-figured into a contestable act of faith finding its most active expression in states


shaped by the history of Christianity on the European continent and the settler so-cieties it spawned, it becomes more feasible to engage a late-modern world of speedand dense interdependencies. For today cosmopolitanism involves the difficult taskof coming to terms receptively and reciprocally with multiple and contending finalsources of morality. Some of these sources predominate in this or that area of theworld, but several contenders also find active expression within a variety of territor-ial states. Kantianism can provide one noble moral faith within a plural matrix ofcosmopolitanism. But this cultural particularism can no longer pretend to set theuniversal matrix of cosmopolitanism itself.

Concentric and Eccentric Culture

Today, when speed compresses distance and intercultural action transcends stateboundaries, the cosmopolitan dimension of politics becomes both unavoidable anddiverse. There are military, corporate, Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Muslim, ecologi-cal, aboriginal, and feminist modes of cosmopolitanism for starters, with each typecontaining considerable variety in itself and involved in a series of alliances andstruggles with several of the others. Even fervent nationalists of a decade ago arehopping onto the bumper of the cosmopolitan bandwagon. Thus Samuel Huntington,recently a devotee of the nation-state and the provincial citizen, now invokes whatmight be called civilizopolism. This is Huntington’s implicit concession to the com-pression of territory by the acceleration of speed: The territorial nation, he con-cludes, is no longer large enough to secure the political unity essential to military secu-rity and civilian governance. It must be secured by a more encompassing civilization.10

Unlike Kant, Huntington does not project a (Western) universalthat non-Western cultures might someday hope to emulate. Rather, he now defines“Western civilization” as a unique, nonuniversalizable territorial formation that exceedsthe size of any territorial state and must be protected from migration and other as-saults from other territorial “civilizations.” But even as he cuts the Kantian universaldown to civilizational size, he shares with Kant a concentric model of political culture.For Kant culture radiates out from the individual through the family to the nation,and he projects a future whole in which all nations participate in the same “moral re-ligion.” The latter forms the largest circle of concentric culture. Huntington adoptsanother variant of the same image of culture. The world is organized for him intoseveral territorial civilizations. And “Western civilization” forms the largest circle of identification in which Huntington himself participates. Identity in “the West,”Huntington thinks, flows from the family to the neighborhood to the community tothe nation to Western civilization and back again, with each arc in this spiral resonat-

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ing with identities, mores, customs, values, and interests in the others. So Huntingtonand Kant split on the debate between “particularism” and “universalism.” But theyboth locate that debate within a concentric image of culture. In fact the familiar de-bate between particularists and universalists is often set in a concentric model of cul-ture elevated above critical interrogation by the disputants.

In a fast-paced world “the West” cannot be self-sustaining. SoHuntington gives primary responsibility to “the core state” within Western civiliza-tion, that is, to the United States. Its job is to protect the larger civilizational complexfrom multiculturalism on the inside as well as economic and military threats fromthe outside. To sustain this model of civilizational governance, however, Huntingtonmust anticipate citizens whose identifications and allegiances do not stop at theboundaries of the state within which they reside. Some dimensions of membership,such as the sense of belonging and support for cross-state, intracivilizational actions,extend to the edges of Western civilization as such — wherever those edges are. AsHuntington puts it in a formulation expressing succinctly the concentric image of po-litical culture, “A civilization is an extended family.”11 Huntington, the former de-fender of national interest narrowly defined, has remade himself into a civilizopolite.

The need today, however, is to complicate the images of nation-alism and civilizopolism by paying attention to numerous eccentric connections thatexceed them. The idea is not to delegitimate all concentric identifications as such.For you may well have a sense of belonging to the family that nourishes you or wishto participate in the state that governs you. It is to appreciate how — particularlyduring a time when speed compresses distance — concentric circles of political cul-ture are complicated and compromised by numerous crosscutting allegiances, con-nections, and modes of collaboration. It is to lift the experience of eccentric cultureabove the automatic connotation of isolation, perversity, and marginalization that it-self reveals the extent to which the concentric image prevails, doing so to identifyeccentric flows of flight, compassion, connection, allegiance, identification, legitimacy,responsiveness, and responsibility that exceed the concentric image of how politicalculture does and must function. Even more, it is to take advantage of the possibili-ties created by the compression of distance to enact a more vibrant plurality of ec-centric connections cutting through and across concentric enclosures. You mightcultivate ties to ecologists or feminists in South America more significant than thoseyou share on these two issues with some neighbors, in-laws, or corporate leaders inyour state. You might support cross-country citizen networks designed to protectrain forests in several countries (including your own), or to reduce toxic emissions inthe world, doing so to support future life anywhere and everywhere on the planet.12

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You might support movements to honor a plurality of moral sources within andacross states, perhaps finding more allies among atheists in Europe, Buddhists in Ti-bet, Arabs in Israel, and secularists in Australia than in your neighborhood or pro-fessional association. And you might cultivate a network of interconnections amongthese territorially dispersed constituencies. You might forge extrastate lines of con-nection with aboriginal peoples, targets of state torture, refugees, or boat people,partly because you extrapolate from experiences of minority standing in your ownstate to these more radical conditions, partly because your state may have helped toproduce the injuries involved, and partly because you realize that cross-state citizenpressure is often needed to modify oppressive state, interstate, and internationalcorporate practices.

In these cases, and numerous others, your participation may re-quire creative political tactics, such as the formation of e-mail networks to protectthe rain forests, or a cross-border citizen divestment movement to end apartheid, orthe organization of cross-country boycotts against corporations using child labor, orthe introduction of cross-border labor negotiations with international corporations,or the creation of global tribunals to try symbolically tyrants who remain beyond thereach of effective tribunals in their own states.13 The key point is that such assem-blages involve activists in advanced capitalist states listening and responding to theinitiatives of migrant workers from other states, indigenous leaders within your state,women seeking educational opportunity in India, and participants in insurgent move-ments in Africa. Those who have been diasporized through complex histories of col-onization, migration, creolization, asylum, and flight provide key mediating linksthrough which new assemblages of cosmopolitan action are forged: cosmopolitan con-nections moving across the concentric dimension of culture as well as in its circles; acosmopolitanism organized through ec-centric connections as well as concentric at-tachments. Still, the question is inevitably posed, if Kantian universalism does notprovide the highest circle of guidance for cosmopolitan movements in a world markedby ec-centric and concentric connections, what else does or could? How do you con-nect to others elsewhere without a firm universal accepted by all? Are such effortsnecessarily devoid of inspiration and guidance? If so, do they collapse into relativism,subjectivism, provincialism, or narcissism? Martha Nussbaum thinks so. She thinksthat unless “we” reach a consensus on a thick, vague experience of the universal,there will not be enough to draw upon to inspire and inform citizen actions thatstretch beyond the circle of the “country.” Nussbaum is a cosmopolite who reachesbeyond the moral circle of the nation in the name of the universal. Here is what shesays:

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We should recognize humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental in-gredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and respect.

We should give our first allegiance to no mere form of government, no tem-poral power, but to the moral community made up by the humanity of all humanbeings. The idea of the world citizen is in this way the ancestor and source ofKant’s idea of the “kingdom of ends.” . . . One should always behave so as totreat with equal respect the dignity of reason and moral choice in every humanbeing.

They must learn enough about the different to recognize common aims, aspi-rations, and values, and enough about these common ends to see how vari-ously they are instantiated in many cultures and their histories.

If one begins life as a child who loves and trusts his or her parents it is tempt-ing to want . . . an idealized image of a nation (as) a surrogate parent. . . . Cos-mopolitanism offers no such refuge; it offers only reason and the love of human-ity, which may seem at times less colorful than other sources of belonging.14

There are things to admire in Nussbaum’s position, particularlyby comparison to that of Huntington. She refuses to curtail connections and obliga-tions to others once you reach the boundaries of your “nation” or your “civiliza-tion.” In For Love of Country Nussbaum’s case for extending such commitments be-yond the states we inhabit derives primarily from Kant, as these quotations amplyindicate. She does not, however, evince any appreciation of the dicey role that apod-ictic recognition plays at the very base of Kantian morality. And that presents diffi-culties if she wants to forge ec-centric connections beyond the historical orbit ofChristendom. Nor does she address the intrastate diversity of fundamental moralsources, one that becomes urgent when migrations and internal mutations drawmany who are neither Christian nor Kantian into states with a predominantly Chris-tian heritage.

In another essay, however, Kant gives ground to Aristotle. I donot know how Nussbaum squares her Aristotle with her Kant, but I imagine shemight proceed by saying that the Kantian element provides the authoritative basisfor moral obligation to people in other cultures (but must they accept that basistoo?), while her modified Aristotelianism fills out (more than Kant would) the func-tional universals to which to appeal in cross-cultural engagements.

Nussbaum calls her list of universals “thick and vague.” I likethat characterization, as a first approximation. These formulations rise, she then

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says, above differences in metaphysical or religious orientation. Hmmmm, I haveheard that one before. They can be filled out in particular ways in each “locality.”Their thickness gives “us” resources to draw upon in expressing and informing com-passion for people suffering in other places. And their vagueness allows them to beparticularized to those localities. So Nussbaum appreciates both the “universal” and“the particular.”

Sounds pretty good, huh? But not, on reflection, good enough.There is far too little appreciation in Nussbaum’s account of how much each render-ing of the universal itself is shaped and conditioned by the specific cultural experi-ences from which it is crafted. Consider merely the first two items on her list of tenuniversal goods:

1) Being able to live to the end of a complete human life, as far as is possible;not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be notworth living.

2) Being able to have good health; to be adequately nourished; to have ade-quate shelter; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction; being able tomove from place to place.15

Yes, these vague generalities make a claim on us. I embrace them.But as soon as three people anywhere discuss them a series of intense debates ariseas to how they are to be interpreted and applied. And yet the list of universals is sup-posed to regulate those debates. Thus the situation today with respect to several is-sues encompassed by merely the first two items on the list:

• The right to doctor-assisted suicide

• The relation between sensuality and chastity

• The relation between marriage and sexuality

• The legitimacy of homosexuality

• The legitimacy of abortion

There are profound disagreements over those issues, often be-tween people who endorse the language adopted by Nussbaum. And it is imperativeto acknowledge that these differences occur within numerous localities and states aswell as across them. Such debates often reflect philosophical/religious differences.Take the issue of dying. Epicurus, Augustine, Kant, and Nietzsche — to select merely

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four exemplary perspectives only within Europe broadly defined — disagree profoundlyon the question of when and how to die. Augustine insists that we are obligated towait until God takes us. Kant agrees. He holds all those who attempt suicide in con-tempt. Nietzsche, however, recommends that you prepare yourself now to end life at the point when it falls below a minimal threshold of consciousness and vitality.Augustine and Kant would thus resist doctor-assisted suicide out of respect for thegrace and wisdom of the universal God; Epicurus and Nietzsche would support it toencourage people to fend off existential resentment against finitude and the absenceof an intrinsic purpose so as to be better able to tap into the existential fund of com-passion and generosity in this life. To probe the issue more closely would be to en-counter further nuanced difference between Epicurus and Nietzsche, as well as be-tween Augustine and Kant.

All these differences flow to a significant degree from metaphysical/religious differences lodged within a universal that proves to be more jerry-riggedthan it might appear at first glance. Moreover, neither Nussbaum nor I thought ofdoctor-assisted suicide as a contemporary possibility until a new social movementconverted it into an issue for us. And this despite the fact that we both embrace therelevant universals. Such surprises will occur again. And again.

These sharp disagreements find ample expression in contempo-rary life, again, within localities and states as well as across them. As do similar dis-agreements with respect to the other issues noted above. When you fold Islam, Bud-dhism, and Hinduism into the picture, the intralocal and cross-state plurality areboth enlarged.

Nussbaum wants a general, nonmetaphysical list of thick, vagueuniversals because she finds it impossible to imagine how compassion could find ex-pression across states unless you uncover such an overarching consensus. She thusregularly describes those who contest the sufficiency of thick universals as “relativists” or“subjectivists” who lack compassion. These types are figured as cold, amoral, playfulbeings. The compassionate Nussbaum in fact shows little empathy for what theseeccentric critters are trying to accomplish. Her representations sound eerily close tothose Augustine gave of those pagans who did not endorse his universal God.

I contend, first, that there are actually few relativists runningaround these days and, second, that compassion plays a significant role in most ofthe orientations Nussbaum disparages. Nietzsche makes the same point about com-passion in Beyond Good and Evil when he says it is “compassion, in other words, againstcompassion,”16 a compassion (in his case) toward the “creator” in us that resists givingfull hegemony to the “creature” in us. Nor do many theorists who resist Nussbaum’s

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single-entry model of the universal represent themselves to be relativists. Nietzsche,for instance, claims that the drive to ressentiment finds some expression in everyculture. He seeks to inspire more people to resist its ugly and punitive orientationtoward eccentric elements of life wherever it arises. That does not sound to me likesomeone who says let every country or locality do as it pleases. Derrida thinks de-construction is an important strategy to apply to every text and cultural practice, be-cause of the unethical tendency in the infrastructure of cultural life per se to concealpoints of rational undecidability in its universal formulas and to make the concen-tric habits of cultural judgment look, well, more generous and compassionate thanthey are.

So I dissent from Nussbaum’s representations of her opponents.But why is she drawn to these representations? It is pertinent to note that her textsdisclose a powerful tendency to identify territorial cultures as if they were concentric, na-tional cultures surrounded by a set of thick, vague universals. It seems to me, however,that most politically organized territories today contain powerful tendencies that ex-ceed and compromise the concentric image through which Nussbaum constitutesculture.17 Cultural lines of flow, connection, flight, and compassion are ec-centric aswell as con-centric.

Would Nussbaum’s moral compulsion to misrepresent her oppo-nents become less intense if her own conception of territorial culture were less con-centric? I think so. For if relativism means accepting whatever norms a nation or lo-cality adopts, it makes most sense either to be one or to accuse others of being so if youpicture politically organized territories of the world as concentric cultures. Relativism,either as sin or as virtue, is implicitly invested in a concentric image of territorialculture. The charge thus reveals more about the presumptions and ideals of thosewho toss it around than about its targets. Hence Nussbaum, Virilio, and severalothers. The concentric model of culture also helps to explain Nussbaum’s impatientirritation with deconstruction and genealogy. For if you are governed by a concen-tric image, you will see little reason for strategies designed to bring out the way thatvery image suppresses, marginalizes, and conceals eccentric flows and connections.And it will make all the sense in the world to conclude that those who practice thesearts lack compassion, for you yourself are tone-deaf to the eccentricities to whichthat receptivity and compassion are applied.18

Let’s test these speculations. Consider Nussbaum’s imaginationof a place called “Textualité,” a world on another planet where those in love withFrench deconstructionism, as Nussbaum understands it, have won the cultural warwith thick universalists:

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There are on Textualité many nations. Some are rich and some are verypoor. Within most of the nations, there are also large inequalities that haveperceptible effects on the health and mobility and educational level of theinhabitants. The people of Textualité do not see things as we see them. Forthey have really discarded — not just in theory but in the fabric of their dailylives — the Earthly tendencies of thought that link the perception of one’sneighbor’s pain to the memory of one’s own and the perception of a stranger’spain to the experience of a neighbor’s, all this through the general idea of thehuman being and human flourishing. To these people, strangers simply lookvery strange. They are seen as other forms of life who have nothing in com-mon with their own lives.19

Nussbaum shows how empty and cruel such a world would be. Iagree. But in doing so she continues to misrepresent a series of political philosophiesalready in circulation on Earth. For she projects onto Textualité the same concentricimage of culture she unconsciously clamps onto this one. That investment finds ex-pression in the interdeterminations between a world of “many nations,” “the peopleof Textualité” (all of whom have lost the human capacity for compassion), “they,”“strangers,” and “forms of life.” She thinks that if they do not share a thick concep-tion of human flourishing they must appear as strangers to one another. This chargereveals an inability to come to terms with a variety of connections across differencein which people touch each other now in this way and now in that, and throughwhich larger webs of alliance and loyalty are often forged. Her description of Textual-ité reflects her own implicit demand that thick universals and concentric culture bejoined together. Textualité tells us more about Nussbaum than about the positionsshe criticizes. Nussbaum’s concentric model of culture discourages her from comingto terms with the politics of becoming by which new identities flow into being andthrough which new connections and alliances are often forged. It also discouragesher from exploring the ethics of those eccentric flows already in motion within andacross territorial regimes.

Nussbaum does advise cosmopolites to pay attention to the “par-ticularities” of foreign places. You compare your cultural assumptions to theirs to lo-cate the element of commonality between them. Not a bad recommendation. But alsoinsufficient. For often enough, commonalities across cultures themselves urgently need tobe subjected to critical scrutiny. Previous conceptions of women, sexuality, race, and theobligation to ground a state in one religion carried considerable weight across sev-eral regimes at one time or another. Many treated them as parts of the thick univer-sal. But each was eventually called into question at a later date by eccentric movements

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within and across those same regimes. And, moreover, when eccentric connectionsbecome consolidated, they might both resist resolution into concentric form andthrow off that aura of denigration previously surrounding them in the concentricworld they now complicate. Such things are apt to happen again. And again.

The insufficiency of the concentric image and thick universalsmust be challenged together. It is appropriate to put some ethical money on thickuniversals that have acquired cultural density in your regime, as you weigh the desireof people to be judged according to operative standards of desert, sexual normality,marriage practice, punishment, dying, parenting arrangements, faith, and so on. Butif you put too much money on them you won’t have much to go on when new, unex-pected movements induce a sense of anxiety or panic into a chunk of your religiousfaith, your sexuality, your gender, your conception of reason, or the source of moral-ity you honor. You won’t have enough to go on as the acceleration of pace throwsuncertainty into some operative dimensions of your way of life that have inadver-tently become consolidated into the layered experience of thick universals. You willbe inclined to treat the next surprise automatically as an affront to the proper au-thority of the universal.

Because we are empirically defined, to a significant degree, bythe circles in which we move, we need periodically to work on ourselves to de-universalizeselective particularities that have become universalized in or by us. And we are unlikely toknow in advance exactly which operative universals will need the most work. So,again, it is not that the concentric image misrepresents territorial culture entirely orthat thick universals must be scrapped. Far from it. But when insufficiently compli-cated by an appreciation of dense, eccentric flows that cross and disrupt these cir-cles, the concentric image points you either to the bellicose particularism of the nation/civilization (Huntington) or to the impatient universalism of concentric cosmopoli-tanism (Nussbaum).

Nussbaum weaves the images of slow time, concentric culture,thick universals, the eclipse of metaphysics, consensus, compassion, and respect forparticularity into a picture of a world in which the acceleration of pace does notmake a difference. While respecting the extranational aspiration that inspires her, Iinvoke, first, a rift in time made more visible by the acceleration of pace today; sec-ond, creative tension between concentric and eccentric connections in cultural life;third, a double-entry orientation to the universal (yet to be discussed); fourth, anelement of contestability in any specific rendering of the universal; and fifth, a prac-tice of compassion that includes critical responsiveness to new flows of identity andaspiration challenging the previous sense of sufficiency of concentric culture.20

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Imagine a slow world elsewhere in the universe called Concen-tricus. There people live entirely in circles of belonging that radiate out from theunity of the individual, through the family, neighborhood, locality, region, territor-ial nation, and civilization to a dense ring of universals that forms a beautiful auraaround the whole. Their compassion is bountiful as it flows up from lower to higheruniversals and down again to lower particulars. Theorists in Concentricus do debatewhether the largest circle is the universal, the civilization, the nation, or the com-munity, but other than that they are pretty much in harmony with one another.Delicate adjustments are made to the particularities of each locality, as these are cre-ated by variations in climate, technology, economic specialization, and so forth. Butneither agonistic respect nor compassion is forthcoming for differences and eccen-tricities that do not fit the concentric scheme; nor is critical responsiveness extendedto movements that seek to create space for new things to be in ways that challengeelements in both the settled character of the locality and the aura of the universal.Differences that exceed, compromise, extend, or break the web of concentric circlesare authoritatively defined through the dismissive vocabularies of relativism, subjec-tivism, narcissism, nihilism, and perversity. For Concentricus does not recognize non-circular orders of being and becoming.

Fortunately, we do not quite live in this horrific world of one-dimensional compassion. But some movements marching under the complementarybanners of particularism, localism, nationalism, civilizationalism, and universalismremain eager to create it.

Toward a New Matrix of Cosmopolitanism

Speed is not the only solvent of thick universals. Surprising events can also shockcultural sedimentations when things move at a fairly slow pace. Thus Bartolomé deLas Casas, the sixteenth-century Spanish priest who accompanied the Conquista-dors to the New World, eventually shifted from a campaign to convert “the pagans”in the New World to Christianity to a quest to roll back the incredible destructionof Amerindian life engendered by the conversion imperative of Christianity. An ag-onizing reappraisal of the Christian universalism he brought with him to the NewWorld enabled him to accomplish this amazing feat of self-redefinition.21 One sideof his faith, Christian love, moved him to modify the universal doctrine of Christian-ity under new and surprising circumstances. He came to terms anew, for instance,with the element of mystery in divinity; and he began to think of Christian and NewWorld cosmologies as two diverse ways to engage the element of mystery. His Chris-tian universalism, that is, became more hesitant and cautious, and this hesitancy al-


lowed him to forge new connections with non-Christian faiths. That, at least, washis eventual reaction to the stunning shock to his faith engendered by the encounterwith a New World populated by millions of people who did not recognize the uni-versal God.

The acceleration of pace may increase the number of such shocksand surprises, even as it multiplies lines of contact and connection. Sometimes thesurprise numbs its recipients, at least for a time. That is one of the dangers of an ac-celerated tempo of life. But when joined to a double-entry orientation to thick uni-versals, the acceleration of pace can also inspire generous possibilities of thought,judgment, and connection otherwise unlikely to emerge.22

Today, for instance, the speed and global networks of communi-cation make it a little less easy to avoid the question of the place of indigenous peo-ples in “settler societies.” Vigorous movements by indigenous peoples in the UnitedStates, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are magnified by the ability of theseconstituencies to combine their efforts and reach an audience beyond the states inwhich they are contained. For hegemonic constituencies, responsiveness to suchmovements involves agonizing reconsideration of the practices of sovereignty, terri-toriality, and nationhood that have informed them.23 A similar set of cross-countrypressures is discernible with respect to homosexuality. The activation of cross-nationalgay rights movements places internal and external pressure on a variety of states toreconsider the universalization and naturalization of heterosexuality. And since thenaturalization of heterosexuality has been inscribed on several layers of being, in-cluding the visceral level, the cultivation of responsiveness to these movements in-volves work on the intersubjective layers of being by multimedia means such asfilms, speeches, marches, and demonstrations. You reenact some of the ways in whichheterosexuality became naturalized to deprogram it as an implicit universal.

Perhaps some theorists depreciate the ambiguity and layered char-acter of constitutive universals because they want morality to function smoothlywithout the agents of morality having to work critically on the shape of their ownlayered identities. They wish ethics were less disruptive to the stability of identitythan it often must be. But the most fundamental obstacle to ethical mobilization isnot, as Kantians and neo-Kantians often think, mustering the collective will to enacta thick universal already there. That is difficult enough. The most fateful ethical is-sues arise when unexpected conflicts emerge over the shape of thick universalsthemselves in ways that disturb visceral elements of identity in the parties involved.For these conflicts involve deep disagreements over the legitimate sources to appealto in negotiating them. Genealogy, deconstruction, and political disturbance can be

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deployed to help call some elements in the settled interpretation of thick universalsinto question when such disagreements arise. These strategies also help to call intoquestion the incontestability of the moral sources we provincials tend to treat as uni-versal. Both of these effects are all to the good for ethics. But before productive workproceeds far, you may also need access to a regulative idea to offer positive inspira-tion and initial guidance. This is the point at which Kant’s notion of a regulativeidea might do productive work for non-Kantians. The distinction between a thick,constitutive universal and a regulative universal may already find some expression inNussbaum’s phrase “reason and the love of humanity,” if the latter feeling is under-stood to conflict sometimes with the putative dictates of reason.

I support a double-entry orientation to the universal, then. Ifconstitutive particulars often become consolidated in our habits, institutions, andpractices as if they formed a set of thick universals, the very diffuseness of a regula-tive idea now becomes a compensatory virtue.24 Kant’s version of the regulative idea,however, needs some critical work, particularly his demand that it be the same regu-lative idea for everyone everywhere. In Kantian philosophy regulative reason func-tions as a diffuse, universal background idea, guiding, in different ways, speculativereason, practical reason, and aesthetic judgment. Regulative reason is unified, evenas it manifests itself differently in each domain and even though we are incapable offormulating this idea in clear concepts. But the Kantian regulative idea presupposesa two-world metaphysic of the supersensible and the sensible. It thus embraces aprofoundly contestable metaphysic during a time in which the global variety of reli-gious/metaphysical perspectives is both visible and palpable.

Perhaps today in a world revolving faster than heretofore we canact as if a diversity of regulative ideals is both ineliminable and replete with promise.There are multiple regulative ideas in play, but, against the Kantian expectation anddemand, it does seems unlikely that a single one will emerge as the diffuse sourcethat all thoughtful pluropolites must draw upon. For some, the regulative idea mightbe responsibility to difference inspired by a monotheism of the Book; for others,contact with the nothingness of being that may inspire participants in Buddhism;and for yet others, the Kantian idea of reason. Each variant of cosmopolitanism se-cretes a distinctive regulative idea, then. If a general matrix is to become consoli-dated, several of these variations must find ways to enter into receptive negotiation.The task today is not to articulate one regulative idea that encompasses all others —the goal of Kantianism, religious ecumenism, and single-entry universalism. Nor isit to rise above metaphysical differences, as if that were an easy or possible thing todo. The task today is to inspire more participants in each religious and metaphysical

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tradition to come to terms receptively with its comparative contestability and to ex-plore creative lines of connection to other orientations. That order, while tall enough,is no taller than the call to diversify Christianity within European states was at theinception of secularism. It sets a horizon toward which to move as time flies by.

The term idea, in my use, means a thought-imbued affect thatenters into an ethical sensibility. A regulative idea is not something you invoke everytime judgment is needed. It comes into play most actively when the necessity ormorality of some elements in a thick universal already in circulation has been calledinto question. It comes into play most dramatically during those numerous junctures whenthe forking of time is significant, ushering events, pressures, or constituencies into being im-perfectly appreciated by established interpretations of the universal. The contemporaryacceleration of pace, and the larger differentials between zones of time, acceleratethe occurrence of such strategic moments.

Let me, then, identify two regulative ideas that inspire nonthe-ists such as me in such situations, to the extent I can. They are attachment to theearth and care for a protean diversity of being that is never actualized completely inany particular cultural setting. These thought-imbued sources of inspiration in turnare grounded in visceral gratitude for an abundance of being that precedes them.Such attachments and ideas, however, do not transcend the interests, desires, andidentities of those moved by them; rather, they enter into these modalities, stretch-ing them a little here and ennobling them a bit there. Such ideas are capable of in-spiring a significant minority ethically; they are susceptible to further cultivation byartistic means; and they are invaluable to draw upon periodically when some elementsin a constitutive universal heretofore occupying you has been called into question bya new fork in time. Moreover, these regulative ideas may help nontheists learn howto listen more closely to less earthy ethical orientations. For many devotees of oneor another religion of the Book construe the most fundamental ideas in our per-spective to be indispensable way stations in their own perspectives; while we con-sider the fundamental conceptions of divinity they endorse to be contestable projec-tions we can respect as contestable possibilities without adopting them ourselves.Here we uncover, then, a potential line of selective connection that does not assumethe form of an overarching commonality. There are numerous other such possibilities.

The idea-feelings in the regulative ideal I embrace are suscepti-ble to cultivation if and when they already have some foothold in the sensibility in-forming your conduct. There is no cosmic guarantee that such a sensibility mustfind a foothold in everyone. Having a relatively fortunate childhood helps. Once ithas acquired existential weight, the affect-imbued ideas in it can be activated and

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mobilized by particular events. You might, for instance, encounter unexpected suf-fering in others engendered by the specific interpretation of a thick universal youhad heretofore accepted as part of the furniture of being. This has happened to mil-lions of people many times over the past few decades in the domains of faith, race,income, sensuality, and gender roles.

Or you might find yourself gazing one day at a surprising imageof the planet Earth. In 1968, Apollo 8 sent back to earthlings a picture of a vividazure planet suspended in the middle of the solar system, a stunning, bright sphereunlike any planet so far observed from the ground of the earth. This image, receivedas if from nowhere, underlines the fragility and uniqueness of the earth as well as itsrichness as a source of sustenance. Distributed to diverse places in the world, it pro-vides a bountiful source of energy for cross-country ecological movements — a newperspective on the world enabled by speed.

By contrast to the Kantian postulate of a world intelligible in thelast instance — even if humans are incapable of grasping that instance — the regula-tive ideas advanced here project a world containing incorrigible elements of opacity,unintelligibility, and unpredictability because it was neither created nor designed bya higher being. Such a regulative idea requires neither a “dogmatic” (as Kant wouldsay) conception of God nor the “necessary” postulate of a moral God, althoughthere are versions of both to which it can connect. It is grounded, let us say, in theearthy experience of groundless being in a world of abundance without higher design.Such regulative ideas move you closer to sources prospected by Epicurus, Lucretius,Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, and Deleuze than to those invoked by Augustine,Newton, and Kant. Again, I do not reject the latter faiths as possible sources of moralinspiration for others. I merely deny the logic of universality in which each is set.

It still remains perplexing to many Kantians, neo-Kantians, or-thodox Christians, and single-entry universalists how some could be moved by suchan earthy idea. And, it must be said, some of us remain perplexed as to why so manyadults require either a transcendental command or the self-sufficiency of thick uni-versals to energize and guide ethical life. The probable persistence of such reciprocalperplexity is a key issue to acknowledge and address in the new matrix of cosmopoli-tanism. It may be ineliminable.

Kant gives vent to such perplexity when he asks how Spinoza,who seemed moral to him, could consistently be so. Spinoza is a pivotal figure. Thistwo-time heretic inside seventeenth-century Europe lived outside the protection ofChristianity and Judaism, the only two organized religious communities of the time.

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He is a good symbol of an eccentric in a concentrically ordered world. Spinoza,Kant says, is righteous, but is “persuaded there is no God,” and “no future life.” He is

unselfish and wants only to bring about the good. . . . Yet his effort encoun-ters limits: For while he can expect that nature will now and then cooperatecontingently with the purpose of his that he feels so obligated and impelledto receive, he can never expect nature to harmonize with it in a way gov-erned by laws and permanent rules (such as his inner maxims are and mustbe). Deceit, violence, and envy will always be rife around him, even thoughhe himself is honest, peaceable and benevolent. Moreover . . . the other right-eous people he meets . . . will stay subjected to these evils, always, until onevast tomb engulfs them . . . and hurls them, who managed to believe therewere no final purpose in creation, back into the abyss of the purposelesschaos of matter from which they were taken.25

Kant resists the temptation to convict Spinoza of a “lack of com-passion.” He is to be appreciated for that, since Spinoza was widely condemned asan atheist in his day. But it does sound as though Spinoza — already convicted ofheresy by the Jewish community in his hometown and commonly defined by Chris-tian philosophers of the day as a Jewish philosopher — is now doomed to hell onearth by Kant because he does not endorse the Kantian postulate of a moral God.Let us set aside whether Kant correctly attributes to Spinoza the idea of nature as a“purposeless chaos of matter.” The point is Kant’s failure to explore how somemight be inspired ethically by visceral and intellectual participation in a rich worldheld by them to be ungoverned by moral laws. Kant convicts such an orientation ofa performative self-contradiction because he cannot imagine how the adventures,trials, and creative possibilities rendered vivid by such an immanent orientationcould inspire a sense of responsibility to the world and the future in some. He thusde-moralizes an immanent source of ethical inspiration in others to curtail the plu-ralization of final moral sources in Europe. At the close of the paragraph in ques-tion, he insists that Spinoza “must, from a practical point of view. . . assume the exis-tence of a moral author of the world, i.e., the existence of a God; and he can indeedmake this assumption, since it is at least not intrinsically contradictory.”26 Let’s callthe universalization of this “practical point of view” transcendental blackmail. Itamounts to saying, “Either you confess the apodictic recognition of morality as lawand/or the thick universal I take to be essential or I will convict you of inconsistencyor a lack of compassion.” Such a strategy reeks of dogmatic cosmopolitanism. It is

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true, of course, that Spinoza also thinks his philosophy is true universally. But muchmore than Kant, he acknowledges robustly the need to come to terms affirmativelywith the persistent plurality of final ethical sources actually embraced in the world.27

It may be impossible for parties on either side of the transcen-dental/immanent divide to appreciate fully the force of regulative ideas embraced bythose on the other. Why so? Well, your ability to assess the inspirational power ofmy faith is limited by the fact that you are not yourself inhabited by it. Indeed, in aworld marked by mystery and a persistent plurality of deep interpretations there issimply not enough time for mortals to inhabit experimentally every challenging pos-sibility. If we lived forever, that difficulty might be attenuated. But we don’t. Wherevermortals honor freedom, then, they might strive to come to terms ethically with thepersistence of an irreducible plurality of regulative ideas. They might practice ago-nistic respect toward existential faiths that do not move them.

Kant walks to the edge of this perspective when he confessesthat his idea of morality rests in the last instance on recognition rather than argu-ment. But he converts his acknowledgment of the limits of argument into a demandthat every reasonable person must recognize things as he does. And he secures thatdemand by leveling harsh charges against those inside and outside “the West” whodo not do so.

But the jig is up. As the hope to secure a single regulative idea isshaken by a world spinning faster than heretofore, a small window of opportunityopens to negotiate a plural matrix of cosmopolitanisms. The possibilities of affirma-tive negotiation depend upon several parties relinquishing the provincial demandthat all others subscribe to the transcendental, universal, immanent, or deliberativesource of ethics they themselves confess. That ain’t easy. Still, a start can be made inEuro-American regimes as Kantians, neo-Kantians, and Nussbaumites acknowledgethe profound contestability of the conception of morality they confess most fervently,and as they adopt a modest stance toward those who do not confess it. By affirmingwithout existential resentment the element of comparative contestability in the re-spective regulative ideas that move us, we contribute new energies to a plural matrixappropriate to the late-modern world. The possible consolidation of such a matrixinvolves cultivation of agonistic respect between parties who proceed from diversesources. Indeed, the pursuit of agonistic respect across such lines of difference sets athreshold against which to measure the element of compassion in each. Unless, ofcourse, one party dissolves the mysteries of being by proving that its thick univer-sals, transcendental arguments, apodictic recognition, or discursive proof sets thesufficient frame in which everyone must participate. Don’t hold your breath waiting.


To do so is to forfeit the time available to pursue a plural matrix grounded in respectfor diverse responses to persisting mysteries of being.

The indispensability and deep contestability of alternative regu-lative ideas set two conditions of possibility for a new matrix of cosmopolitanism. Tothe extent that a variety of Christians, Jews, secularists, neo-Aristotelians, Islamists,Kantians, deep ecologists, Buddhists, and atheists cultivate such self-modesty in theirrespective existential faiths, the late-modern world becomes populated by more citizenscoming to terms thoughtfully with contemporary issues unsusceptible to resolutionby one country, one faith, or one philosophy.

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coordinated with each other. A change in one correlateswith a change in the other without either causing theother. Stuart Hampshire translates Spinoza’s renderingof two complementary attributes of substance into twoirreducible human perspectives on the same activities, the perspective of lived experience and that of externalobservation of the body/brain states during those expe-riences. In his account a change in brain composition canhave an effect on thinking and vice versa, even thoughthinking is not itself reducible to observed brain states.That is the version I endorse. As we shall see, such a per-spective suggests the need for reconstituting establishednotions of causality in cultural life. I approach this topicin this study, particularly in chapters 2 and 4. See, forinstance, Hampshire’s introduction to The Ethics, trans.Edwin Curley (Oxford: Penguin, 1994).

7. Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tonino, A Universe ofConsciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (New York:Basic Books, 2000), 83. This book was published toorecently for me to incorporate it into this study. Theauthors’ exploration of the rapid, complex “reentrycombinations” between different subsystems of the brainis very pertinent. These reentry combinations engenderconsciousness. This book also brings out why we need to supplement the concept of efficient causality withwhat in the Spinoza tradition would be called “immanentcausality.” An immanent cause is one that emerges out ofthe intersection between external events and the systemof reentrant combinations in a system like the body/brain

1. The Body/Brain/Culture Network

1. Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: SituatingScience, trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1997), 39. Much of what Stengers saysabout the circumstances of modern science is anticipatedby Martin Heidegger in “The Age of the World Pic-ture,” in The Question Concerning Technology, trans.William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Thisessay, written in 1935, poses the issues that Stengerspursues, but then responds to them in a different way.

2. The force of that history is felt even by those of uswho want to refashion it. So in an article in AustralianFeminist Studies, Elizabeth Wilson, who seeks to over-come this separation, says, “Within feminist work, adetermination to refute biological reductionism has hadthe effect of excluding the biological from considerationaltogether.” Elizabeth Wilson, “Somatic Compliance:Feminism, Biology and Science,” Australian FeministStudies 14, no. 29 (1999): 8.

3. Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens:Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace, 2000), 64–65.

4. V. S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain: Probingthe Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: WilliamMorrow, 1998), 130.

5. Ibid., 47–48.

6. Spinoza distinguishes two attributes of substance,extension and thought, which are distinct but

Notes

network. It can usher something new into the world.Social scientists too often simplify causality, whileinterpretive theorists run away from it.

8. In a recent book, Jean-Pierre Changeux, aneuroscientist, and Paul Ricoeur, a philosopher andphenomenologist, debate the role of neuroscience in thestudy of thinking and ethics. Each announces himself atthe outset as a Spinozist with respect to the mind/bodyproblem, but differences soon emerge in theirinterpretations of that doctrine. Ricoeur deploysparallelism to protect thinking from technique, whileChangeux treats it as precisely the philosophy thatencourages such interventions. I agree with Changeux onthis point, as will become clear in chapter 4. Althoughthe authors try to bracket differences in “ontology,”Ricoeur’s desire to insulate the highest levels of beingfrom neuroscience expresses one existential faith whileChangeux expresses investment in another. Neither faithhas been proven to date. And I doubt that suchdifferences can be bracketed entirely, although how theyare introduced is crucial. See Jean-Pierre Changeux andPaul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist anda Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and theBrain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,2000).

9. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 62.

10. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain, 130.

11. Ibid., 141.

12. Ibid., 26–27.

13. Ibid., 33.

14. Ibid., 35.

15. Ibid., 56.

16. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and NarrativeCinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18; Tania Modleski,The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and FeministTheory (New York: Metheun, 1988), chap. 6.

17. In Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacanthrough Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992),Slavoj Zizek offers masterful readings of severalHitchcock films, including Vertigo. In the latter, heexplains the attraction of the plot amid its apparentimprobability “precisely” by “this impossible relationshipbetween the fantasy figure and the ‘empirical’ womanwho, quite by chance, finds herself occupying this fantasyplace” (83). “The point of these observations,” in turn,“is that the sublime quality of an object is not intrinsicbut rather an effect of its position in the fantasy space”(84). I find Zizek’s account persuasive, up to a point. Thedissent arises if the fantasy becomes treated as both anall-consuming and unmodifiable feature of desire. On myreading, Hitchcock’s tactic to plant a subliminal doubt inScottie about the falling body suggests both that

additional lures are needed to draw him into the searchfor Madeleine and that the fantasy itself, if and as itarises, might be susceptible to modification by tacticalwork. Both points apply to viewers of the film, too, someof whom are less invested in the fantasy than others.Some men and women, for instance, are closer intemperament to Midge — the down-to-earth designer ofundergarments for women — than to either Scottie orMadeleine. It is not Zizek’s interpretation, then, that Icontest, but the aura of certainty and incorrigibility thatsurrounds it. That issue, in turn, is linked to the questionof how film techniques work on us and what differenceour appropriations of them can make to the type orstrength of the fantasies in which we participate. Freudhimself, as we shall see, worked hard to delimitlegitimate techniques of self-modification. I seek toexpand their range, without claiming too much for theirefficacy. Zizek and I may well diverge at this point.Finally, Zizek gives no sign that he acknowledges thedeep contestability of the most basic assumptions ofLacanian theory. I will argue that this acknowledgmentforms a critical virtue of theory itself. Finally, he oftennotes how theorists such as Deleuze and Foucault cannot“explain” x, or offer an adequate “account” of it,suggesting that he has not addressed their claim that thevery quest for consummate explanation reflects acontestable image of nature, thinking, and culture, onethey do not embrace. On this point, too, I concur withthem.

18. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans.Jonathan Griffin (London: Quartet, 1986), 124.

19. In The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments,Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001), Jane Bennett examines severalreductionist readings of the aestheticization of politicsand makes the case for a positive relation betweenenchantment and ethics.

20. For a very thoughtful study that examinescomparatively the ontological dimension in severalpolitical theories, including mine, exploringcomparatively how this dimension infiltrates into ethicaland political priorities, see Stephen K. White, SustainingAffirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in PoliticalTheory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,2000).

21. “The free will finds itself immediately confrontedby differences which arise from the circumstance thatfreedom is its inward function and aim, and is in relationto an external and already existing subsisting objectivity,which splits up into different heads: viz. anthropologicaldata . . . , external things of nature which exist inconsciousness, and the ties of relation between individualwills.” George Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans.William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), no. 483, p.241. Hegel folds the objective dimension of culture into a

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third, unfolding “absolute” dimension. For a study thatendorses the non-Hegelian conception of time embracedhere while focusing on the objective dimension ofculture, see Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years ofNonlinear History (New York: Swerve, 2000). De Landa’sdiscussion of the relations between numerous invasionsand occupations and the development of the Englishlanguage is particularly fascinating.

2. The Color of Perception

1. Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics,Media (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996),116–17.

2. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 264.

3. Dream Story is the title of the book by ArthurSchnitzler upon which the film is based. The dialogue ofthe film and the novel are reprinted in Frederic Raphaeland Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut (New York:Warner, 1999).

4. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Pauland W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone, 1991), 78.

5. Ibid., 82.

6. Ibid., 56.

7. Brian Massumi explores this feature of Bergson’stheory superbly in “The Autonomy of Affect,” in Deleuze:A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell,1996), 217–39.

8. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 80.

9. Quoted in Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, andEleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science andHuman Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 162.

10. Ibid., 174–75.

11. In a letter to Henri Bergson in 1907 discussingMatter and Memory, James says: “To me at present thevital achievement of the book is that it inflicts anirrecoverable death-wound upon Intellectualism. It cannever resuscitate! But it will die hard, for all the inertia ofthe past is in it, and the spirit of professionalism andpedantry as well as the aesthetic-intellectual delight ofdealing with categories logically distinct yet logicallyconnected, will rally for a desperate defense.” ElizabethHardwick, ed., The Selected Letters of William James(Boston: Nonpareil, 1980), 237. See also Bergson’s essayon James in his The Creative Mind: An Introduction toMetaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York:Citadel, 1992). In “On the Pragmatism of WilliamJames,” Bergson says: “When his book The Varieties ofReligious Experience appeared, many saw in it only a seriesof very vivid descriptions. . . . This was a completemisinterpretation. . . . The truth is that James leaned out

upon the mystic soul, as on a spring day, we lean out tofeel the caress of a breeze on our cheek. . . . For him thosetruths it is most important for us to know, are truthswhich have been felt and experienced before beingthought” (214–15). We engage James’s remarkableexploration of mystical states in chapter 4.

12. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 160–61.

13. Ibid., 126. It is also interesting to see how oftenDamasio invokes film to illustrate a process in theneurophysiology of perception or consciousness. When Ifirst read Gilles Deleuze’s claim that film production andneurophysiology have unconsciously influenced eachother, I found the claim to be dubious. It now seemsalmost too obvious to repeat.

14. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion,Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon, 1994),194.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 175.

17. Ibid., 158.

18. This poster is presented in Louis Giannetti,Understanding Movies, 8th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.:Prentice Hall, 1999), 503. This book offers an excellentprimer on film technique, and it concludes with a readingof Citizen Kane. The study is weakened, however, by thefact that the author divides films into two types, realisticand formalistic. Kane is irreducible to such a division,because it eschews realism but is not captured byformalism. Deleuze also has a tendency to divide filmsinto two different types, classical and modern. Althoughthis typology works better, and Deleuze qualifies it often,it too seems to me to diminish our powers of filminterpretation more than it enhances them. I amindebted to John Docker for showing me how myanalysis of Citizen Kane does not require endorsement ofthese divisions.

19. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image,trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Deleuze does notanalyze the scene I am about to consider, but myinterpretation of it is informed by his general account ofthe depth-of-field shot. He considers Welles to be theinventor of this shot. We will follow Deleuze himself inexploring more deeply the implications of depth-of-fieldshots for thinking in chapter 4.

20. Giannetti, Understanding Movies, 478.

21. One could, of course, claim that this superiorposition allows one to offer the definitive interpretation.Ann Kaplan does not attempt that, but in a thoughtfulpiece she suggests that film noir (of which I take CitizenKane to be a sample) can portray the “white maleculture’s dis-ease” with woman, homosexuality, and race.

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Her example from Welles is The Lady from Shanghai. Sheappreciates how Welles portrays class issues but discernsa cultural unconscious at work in the portrayal of genderand race. One could readily read Citizen Kane as a film inwhich the dark shadows, ominous lighting, and intensevisual compositions combine with Kane’s destructiveamorous relations to portray him as a man increasingly atodds with culturally obligatory sexual bonds with women.What one cannot do, without assuming the masculineassumption of interpretive mastery that Kaplan resists, isdissolve the enigma of Rosebud by reference to thatissue. My sense is that Kaplan would concur in this point.See E. Ann Kaplan, “The ‘Dark Continent’ of Film Noir:Race, Displacement and Metaphor in Tourneur’s CatPeople (1942) and Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai(1948),” in Women in Film Noir, 3d ed., ed. E. AnnKaplan (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 183–201.

22. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism,Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, N.C.: DukeUniversity Press, 1995), 16.

23. Ibid., 65.

24. I merely note here that even the great universalist,Kant, reaches the point in his moral theory whereargument must give way to “apodictic recognition.” So,to put it bluntly, morality, for this paradigmaticuniversalist, is not reducible to argument. Culture is noteither. I concur with him on the second point but contesthis conclusion that the recognition that moralityintrinsically takes the form of law is apodictic. I explorethis issue in chapter 7 in the context of examining variousapproaches to cosmopolitanism.

25. In The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1995), I argue thatpluralism is best understood as a set of productivetensions between a preexisting pattern of diversity andnew possibilities of pluralization coming into being outof injuries, energies, and differences not yet elevatedonto the register of identity, legitimacy, or justice.

26. Michaels, Our America, 133.

27. Brain processes are as layered as the culture woveninto their differential capacities. Thus the amygdala, thesmall, intense brain nodule located below the prefrontalcortex, contains culturally influenced tendencies toaction. But the system in which it is set is too crude incapacity and too fast in reaction to be linguisticallysophisticated. Nonetheless, the subsystem in which itparticipates both organizes coarse infraperceptions andimpulses to action on its own and forms relays with morecomplex brain regions that do so in slower, moresophisticated ways. Its intensities help to shape theirprioritizations with respect to perception, argument,interpretation, and action. The amygdala cannot bechanged by argument alone, but it, or the relays in whichit is implicated, may be susceptible to some degree to

tactics of change that mimic the way it was culturallyprogrammed. I imagine that the rituals and liturgies ofsome churches do part of their work on this level ofbeing. The amygdala appears to be involved ingeneration of the emotions of fear and anxiety, but notjoy or happiness. For the best review of the priority ofthe amygdala in emergency situations, along with itsrelations to more sophisticated brain nodules, see JosephLeDoux, The Emotional Brain (New York: Simon &Schuster, 1996). In chapter 4, I explore the role oftechniques of the self and micropolitics in educatingthose dimensions of thinking and culture that help toshape the direction of argument but fall below itseffective reach.

28. Michaels, Our America, 139.

3. Nature, Affect, Thinking . . .

1. “The presupposition that things are, at bottom,ordered so morally that human reason must bejustified — is . . . the after-effect of belief in God’sveracity.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed.Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J.Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), no. 471, p. 262.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. WalterKaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), no. 111, p. 171.Nietzsche goes on in a parallel passage in The Will toPower: “Logic is the attempt to comprehend the actualworld by means of a scheme of being posited byourselves; more correctly, to make it formulatable andcalculable for us” (no. 516, p. 279). Nietzsche does notseek to scrap logic, of course. That would be to decry thevery ambiguity of life he seeks to affirm. He dependsupon it even in the sentence in which he calls itssufficiency for life into question.

3. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, no. 616, p. 330.

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans.Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1978), 200–201.For close engagement with a host of formulations byNietzsche on his conception of nature, see Babette E.Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1994). Babich does asuperb job not only of marshaling the appropriateformulations from Nietzsche’s corpus, but of bringinghis conception of nature into coordination with his largerphilosophy of art and life.

5. Part III of Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy ofMorals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage,1969), for instance, proceeds through a reading of“asceticism” as it appears in the history of Christianity toan appraisal of its migration to modern science. Theformulations are still startling: “This pair, science andthe ascetic ideal, both rest on the same foundation — Ihave already indicated it: on the same overestimation oftruth (more exactly: on the same belief that truth is

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inestimable and cannot be criticized). Therefore they arenecessary allies, so that if they are to be fought they canonly be fought and called into question together” (153).

6. Nonequilibrium “may in fact be taken as the verybasis of the definition of a biological system.” IlyaPrigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos:Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam,1984), 13.

7. Ilya Prigogine, with Isabelle Stengers, The End ofCertainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature (NewYork: Free Press, 1997), 14, 72.

8. Ibid., 189. Elsewhere, Prigogine puts the point thisway: even in chaotic phenomena like turbulence, “astrange tumult reigns, the complete opposite ofindifferent disorder.” Ilya Prigogine and IsabelleStengers, “Postface: Dynamics from Leibniz toLucretius,” in Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science,Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1982), 153.

9. Prigogine, The End of Certainty, 16. Here is aformulation by Nietzsche that is remarkably close to thatof Prigogine: “That the world is not striving toward astable condition is the only thing that has been proved.Consequently, one must conceive its climactic conditionsin such a way that it is not a condition of equilibrium.”The Will to Power, no. 639, p. 341.

10. Immanuel Kant, preface to the 2d ed., Critique ofPure Reason, 2d ed., trans J. M. Dent (New York:Everyman’s Library, 1954), 13–14.

11. Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, 13.

12. Ibid., 187.

13. The notion of reversible and deterministtrajectories “does not belong exclusively to classicaldynamics. It is found in relativity and in quantummechanics” as well. For example, in the model of theatom wherein “each orbit is characterized by a well-determined energy level in which electrons are in steady,eternal, and invariable movement. . . . The orbits aredefined as being without interaction with each other orwith the world.” This is the case even though otheraspects of quantum mechanics are at odds with thisLeibnizian model: electrons are also pictured as able to“jump from one orbit to another. . . . It is here thatquantum mechanics . . . does not define the deterministand reversible description as being complete.” Prigogineand Stengers, “Postface,” 146.

14. Stengers, Power and Invention, 10–11.

15. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, no. 112, p. 173.


17. Stengers, Power and Invention, 39.

18. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense:Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York:Picador, 1998), 15 n. 14.


20. Quoted in Stengers, Power and Invention, 40.

21. See Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. ArthurMitchell (New York: Dover, 1998); Stephen J. Gould,Evolution and the History of Life (New York: Basic Books,1999).

22. Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives onNietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (New York:Routledge, 1997), 132.

23. A suggestive exploration of the culture of birds inrelation to human culture is developed in Gilles Deleuzeand Félix Guattari, “1837: Of the Refrain,” in A ThousandPlateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. BrianMassumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1987).

24. This is an area of considerable dispute in neuro-physiology today. Daniel Dennett, reviewing theavailable evidence in Consciousness Explained (Boston:Little, Brown, 1991), supports the idea. Andy Clark, inBeing There: Putting Brain, Body, and World TogetherAgain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), contests it. Theexample alluded to in the text comes from new researchthat has not yet been critically examined by otherinvestigators. The results were attained by a team ofneuroscientists at the University of Washington studyingdyslexic children. They are summarized in EricNagourney, “Exploring Dyslexia and Brain Energy,” NewYork Times, June 6, 2000.

25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology ofPerception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge,1962), 189.

26. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, no. 333, p. 262.

27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J.Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968), 82–83.

28. Nietzsche does and must work hard to reconfigureour reading of these two modalities as well.

29. William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (NewYork: Dover, 1890), 288.

30. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, no. 477, pp. 263–64.

31. Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 255, 256.

32. For an excellent study that places a god where Ilocate the nonideational outside of thought, see CharlesTaylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). Taylorappeals to divine grace in the penultimate sentence of thebook, where he resists the idea that a certain alienation isour “inevitable lot.” “It is a hope that I see implicit in

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Judeo-Christian theism (however terrible the record ofits adherents in history), and in its central promise of adivine affirmation of the human, more total than humanscan ever attain unaided” (521). I respond to Taylor’s ideaof a divine intelligence to which human thought seeks tobecome attuned in “Where the Word Breaks Off,” inPolitics and Ambiguity (Madison: University of WisconsinPress, 1987).

33. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans.Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

34. I make the positive case for this ethical orientationas one among others to be negotiated in a positive ethosof engagement in “An Ethos of Engagement,” in Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1999), 137–61.

35. In Being There, Andy Clark explores how languageprovides an indispensable “scaffolding” for refinedthinking. He shows thereby how thinking extendsbeyond the brain of a thinker into a public world. In thatbook, and particularly in his chapter 10, Clark supportsthe themes I am exploring. His exposé of how non-representational theories overplay their hand is partic-ularly useful, for he shows how the expressive andrepresentational images, once both are refined, can berendered compatible. Clark, however, may underplayhow discursive practices fold back upon selves andconstituencies, helping to modify elements in theirbodies and brains.

36. For an exploration of the connection between theexpressive and self-organizational dimensions of lan-guage in Augustine, see William E. Connolly, TheAugustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics ofMorality (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1993). I pose theissue in chapter 2 of that volume: “Words, for Augustine,provide the fuel of confession. Words do not simplyrepresent a world of determinate things. Nor do theysimply create (or constitute) things according to thedictates of cultural convention. . . . Words, strainedthrough the soul of those who speak them and hearthem, can be media of perversion or of conversion. . . .Divine words inscribed in scripture, when they areconfessed to the one true god, are the most powerfulmedia of conversion, healing, and moralization availableto humanity” (43–44). Of course divine grace is evenmore powerful. My sense is that some secular theorists oflanguage shy away from its expressive and compositionaldimensions because they fear that attention to these verydimensions will give too much power to religious forces.In doing so, however, they lose sight of importantconnections among thinking, language, and freedom.

37. The most significant places this amendment ispursued are in Gilles Deleuze, “The Image of Thought,”in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1994); and Gilles

Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Micropolitics andSegmentarity,” A Thousand Plateaus.

38. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, no. 47, p. 101. Thetext by Antonio Damasio is Descartes’ Error. Damasio issuperb at presenting examples of people who have lostsome or part of their affective capacities throughselective brain damage and then articulating the effectsthis has on the quality and timbre of thought. Althoughcalculative thinking can proceed without much affect, heconcludes, lack of affect imposes severe limits on purereason. If Damasio’s excellent research were joined to themodel of nature advanced by Nietzsche and by Prigogineand Stengers, who knows what profound things wouldemerge? Damasio is already tempted a bit in thisdirection. Perhaps this is a suitable place to drawattention again to Brian Massumi’s superb essay “TheAutonomy of Affect.”

4. Techniques of Thought and Micropolitics

1. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, in The EpicureanPhilosophers, ed. John Gaskin, trans. C. Bailey, R. D.Hicks, and J. C. A. Gaskin (London: J. M. Dent, 1995),126, 161. The editor worries about the physiology ofLucretius. It is “old-fashioned by the standards ofAlexandrian science even when he wrote. Fortunately thephilosophical argument is not disturbed by reading‘brain’ . . . for ‘middle region of the breast.’ ” (161 n).

2. Tor Nørretranders, The User Illusion: CuttingConsciousness Down to Size, trans. Jonathan Sydenham(New York: Viking, 1998), 255.

3. Rafael Nuñez, “Reclaiming Mind, Body andCognition,” in Reclaiming Cognition: The Primacy ofAction, Intention and Emotion, ed. Rafael Nuñez andWalter J. Freeman (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 1999), 59.Several essays in this volume struggle with the questionof how to reconceive causality in a body/brain/culturematrix marked by innumerable relays and feedback loops.The key, I think, is to translate efficient causality intoimmanent causality. The latter involves, first, the relationbetween external events and internal circuits of self-organization and, second, a process of infusion orcomposition by which body/brain processes becomeorganized into new patterns.

4. Nørretranders, The User Illusion, 170.

5. Reported in Matthew W. Browne, “Who NeedsJokes? Brain Has a Ticklish Spot,” New York Times,March 10, 1998, D1.

6. As Nørretranders points out in The User Illusion, the“half-second delay” is actually an average. Nørretrandersappreciates that you might object that some reactiontimes are “a lot shorter than 0.5 second. It does not takea half a second to snatch your fingers away when youburn them! So how can it take half a second to move of

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your own free will? . . . Well, it can because reactions arenot conscious. . . . Our reaction time is much shorter thanthe time it takes to initiate a conscious action” (221). Wemove here, as we shall see, into the quick, crude reactiontime of the amygdala that precedes feeling andconsciousness.

7. Ibid., 164. This phrase occurs when Nørretranders iscontesting the sufficiency of those computer models ofthe mind that seek to formulate the rules that governconscious thinking. For a superb exploration of the“missing half second” that prompts some of my thinking,see Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect.”

8. An earlier, schematized discussion of how the half-second delay is subjected to different interpretations inthe traditions of Kant and immanent naturalism can befound in my “Brain Waves, Transcendental Fields, andTechniques of Thought,” Radical Philosophy (March/April1999): 19–26. That essay foreshadows the engagementwith technique in this one.

9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans.Vasilis Politis (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 145.

10. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason,trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1993),49.

11. There is another contemporary reading of Kantthat translates his complex revision of the two-worldmetaphysic into an early version of the “two-aspect”model. Whereas Peter Strawson, Stuart Hampshire, andGilles Deleuze support the two-world interpretation ofKant (and then try to revise it in the direction of animmanent materialism), Paul Redding explores the workof philosophers who develop the two-aspect reading inThe Logic of Affect (Melbourne: Melbourne UniversityPress, 1999). This reading draws Kant closer to some ofthe recent work on thought in neuroscience. I think thatreading, which its proponents concede has to truncatethe Kantian model of judgment, is easiest to defend ifyou restrict your attention to the first Critique and ignore the relation of the second and third to it. ForKant himself says that he is trying, first, to create roomfor religious faith and, second, to show how purepractical reason expresses morality as law apodictically.And those two tasks require the postulate of the super-sensible. Why use Kant to support the two-aspect theorywhen you can draw on Epicurus, Spinoza, Nietzsche,Freud, Deleuze, Hampshire, and Damasio to do so? It is tempting to some, I imagine, because several of theselatter thinkers play up the dissonances between layersand the element of wildness in thinking in ways that pull them away from the juridical model of thought inKant. Whichever way you turn on these questions,however, Redding builds an excellent case that mechan-ical models of materialism were deepened and chal-lenged by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century idealist

philosophies (Kant, Schelling, Hegel) that explored theunconscious and intersubjective conditions of possibilityfor conscious thought.

12. Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, 99; emphasisadded.

13. In November 2000, the Center for the CriticalAnalysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers Universityorganized a daylong discussion between Charles Taylorand me on these questions. We concurred on the ideathat faith in the grace of God and nontheistic gratitudefor being are two ethical sources grounded in differencesof faith unlikely to be resolved by definitive means. Theethical question became how to negotiate relationsbetween bearers of such diverse orientations.

14. Stuart Hampshire, “A Kind of Materialism,” inFreedom of Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UniversityPress, 1971), 211.

15. Ibid., 211–12.

16. Ibid., 213.

17. Spinoza’s parallelism has a fascinating complexity.For him the parallelism between thought and extensionmeans that a change in one is matched by acorresponding change in the other, even though there isno causal connection across these lines. This means youcan improve the capacity of the body by improvingthinking and improve the capacity of the mind by actingupon the body. Unfortunately, Spinoza does not focus onthe second domain in the Ethics, saying in part V, “Nowwe are not concerned here . . . with the science of tendingthe body so that it can be perfected. . . . Here . . . I shall bedealing only with the power of mind or reason.” BaruchSpinoza, Ethics: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellectand Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis:Hackett, 1992), 201.

18. Hampshire, “A Kind of Materialism,” 218.

19. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, 280.

20. Ibid., 240.

21. Varela et al., The Embodied Mind.

22. Ibid., 86.

23. Ibid., 139–40.

24. Ibid., 86.

25. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. PaulPatton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 25.

26. Ibid., 139; emphasis added.

27. Ibid. The above quotes point to a line of differencebetween Deleuze and Hampshire. The lines ofconnection are even more important. They are furthersuggested by the fact that Hampshire wrote onesympathetic book on Spinoza and Deleuze wrote two.

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28. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age ofMechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. HannahArendt (New York: Schocken, 1955), 235.

29. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 50.

30. Deleuze’s image invites comparison to thatdeveloped by Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind(New York: Harvest, 1971). There Arendt explores howthinking involves a relation of “two in one” and also howthinking occurs in an unsettled “gap” between past andfuture. The main difference between them, perhaps, isthat Deleuze also accepts a philosophy of nature thatbreaks with a linear conception of time, and he also seeks to fold that conception of nature into the logic ofthinking itself. More about this in chapter 6, where weengage “the rift in time” more closely.

31. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 107–8.

32. Ibid., 107, 207.

33. Quoted in Buster Olney, “Between Pitches (Twist,Tap), a Game within the Game,” New York Times, August22, 1999, 3E.

34. In The Terms of Political Discourse (Boston: Heath,1974; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984),I introduced such terms as misticket to illustrate howconceptual innovations in an established network ofpractices help to promote and consolidate politicalchange. I continue to hold to the ideas of essentiallycontested concepts and the close relation betweenconceptual revision and political change adumbrated inthat book. The major revision I make today is not onwhat might be called the horizontal register of inter-subjectivity, but on the vertical layering of thinking andculture. Thinking works on both registers simultaneously.Proto-thoughts are linguistic in one sense of the term,but because they arise out of the lower brain regions evenwhile having a cultural, intersubjective dimension, theyare not so in a refined or complex way. I resist the(predictable) effort to reduce the lower layers of thinkingand judgment to brute instinct or pure subjectivity.

35. Hampshire, “A Kind of Materialism,” 225.

36. Such a suggestion may reflect the unlayeredconception of sensibility that emerges out of the Kantiantradition. If you deny the supersensible, however, itbecomes possible to develop a richer, layered conceptionof the sensible and the infrasensible. This isapproximately what Nietzsche has in mind when he saysthings like “The body is more profound than the soul.”

37. Deleuze pursues “belief in this world” in Cinema 2.Here “belief” falls below the epistemological register,where you devise tests to ascertain whether a belief istrue or false. That first register of belief is important. Butconviction on the second register involves cultivation of

the sense that life with mortality is worth it, that theexperience of nonlinear time can be tolerable orgratifying, that the fugitive complexity of the body isenchanting even amid its dispositions to injury, suffering,sickness, and death. Deleuze finds both theistic andnontheistic directors who promote this experience. Heprefers the latter himself, but respects the former. Hereis one expression of the idea: “What is certain is thatbelieving is no longer belief in another world, or in atransformed world. It is only, it is simply, believing in thebody. It is giving discourse to the body and, for thispurpose, reaching the body before discourses, beforewords, before things are named” (172–73). Dreyer,Rossellini, Artaud, and Bresson are the artists he saluteson these pages.

38. I discuss this issue in “A Critique of Pure Politics,”in Why I Am Not a Secularist, 163–87.

39. See Varela et al., The Embodied Mind, particularlychaps. 10 and 11.

40. As Asad says, in medieval monastic life, “liturgy isnot a species of enacted symbolism to be classifiedseparately from activities defined as technical but is apractice among others essential to the acquisition ofChristian virtues.” Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion:Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 63.

41. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: AnOverview of Work in Progress,” in The Foucault Reader,ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 369. Theconfined role given to argument in this conception ofethics actually tracks the Kantian claim that morality aslaw is not something known through argument but isrecognized apodictically. This then is the point at whichargument stops and something beyond it begins inKantian morality. To translate the Kantian transcen-dental into an immanent field is to rewrite, rather thansimply reject, Kant’s view about the limits of argument inethics. For an essay that responds to neo-Kantians whoread Foucault reductively, see Jane Bennett, “ ‘How Is It,Then, That We Still Remain Barbarians?’: Schiller,Foucault and the Aestheticization of Ethics,” PoliticalTheory 24 (November 1996): 653–72.

42. The need to step out of the flow periodically isdeveloped in Jane Bennett, Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics,Politics, and the Wild (Lauham, Md.: Rowman &Littlefield, 1994). For a discussion of the impetus toethics from material sources, see Bennett’s TheEnchantment of Modern Life.

43. James Carey, “Political Ritual on Television:Episodes in the History of Shame, Degradation andExcommunication,” in Media, Ritual and Identity, ed.Tamar Liebes and James Curran (New York: Routledge,1998), 57.

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5. Memory Traces, Mystical States, and Deep Pluralism

1. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans.Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage, 1939), 89–90.

2. Ibid., 39.

3. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egyptin Western Monotheism (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1997). The quotation is from line 65 of “TheGreat Hymn,” reprinted on pp. 172–77. Assmannreviews the long minority history in the West in whichthe relation between Egypt and Judaism is subject toreview, reconsideration, and assessment. He doesn’treach a strong conclusion on whether Moses was anEgyptian. And he shows how Freud misreads theIkhanaton faith on the issue of forming images of thedivinity. Two major contributions of Assmann’s book areits exploration of the origins and effects of “counter-religions” on the faiths that preceded them and its reviewof how often “Moses” has been invoked in Europeanhistory to reconsider the relation between monotheismand polytheistic orientations.

4. During a panel at the 1999 APSA convention atwhich Bonnie Honig and I both gave papers on Moses andMonotheism, she opted for the idea that the historicalaccuracy of the story is unimportant for it to do its work.Her thought was that both parties agree that Moses wasraised as an Egyptian, and that fact is more importantthan his biological heritage. I agree that the biologicalheritage of Moses is unimportant. But, for Freud’s storyto work, you must invest a lot in the phrase “raised as anEgyptian.” For Freud that means that Moses deeplyimbibed the faith of Ikhanaton, and that he then laboredintensively to give it to the Hebrew people after hisfather’s death and the renunciation of that faith in Egyptin favor of a return to multiple gods.

5. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 55, 79.

6. Ibid., 63.

7. “The Mosaic religion had been a ‘Father religion.’Christianity became a ‘Son religion.’ The old God, theFather, took second place; Christ, the Son stood in hisstead, just as in those dark times every son had longed todo. Paul, by developing the Jewish religion further,became its destroyer. His success was certainly mainlydue to the fact that through the idea of salvation he laidthe ghost of the feeling of guilt. It was also due to hisgiving up the idea of the chosen people and its visiblesign — circumcision. That is how the new religion wouldbecome all-embracing, universal. Although this stepmight have been determined by Paul’s revengefulness onaccount of the opposition which his innovation foundamong the Jews.” Ibid., 112.

8. Ibid., 117.

9. Ibid., 127.

10. Joseph LeDoux, as I read him, would agree withFreud’s idea of the trace but would probably call intoquestion the long-term inheritance of traces of a primalkilling of the father. See LeDoux, The Emotional Brain. Alot of anthropologists would call into question theuniversal character of the horde Freud projects into thefuture, without, in most cases, coming to terms with theidea of a trace. Anthropologists such as Talal Asad andAnn Stoler, however, seem to me to be drawn to someversion of this latter idea while resisting the idea of auniversal model of the horde in prehistoric human life.

11. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 129–30.

12. “This state of affairs is made more difficult, it istrue, by the present attitude of biological science, whichrejects the idea of acquired qualities being transmitted todescendants. I admit, in all modesty, that in spite of this Icannot picture biological development proceedingwithout taking this factor into account.” Ibid., 127–28.

13. The connection and difference between Freud andJames is suggested in the following formulation byGerald Bruns: “ ‘Let us then propose,’ James says in hisconclusion to Varieties, ‘as an hypothesis, that whatever itmay be on its farther side, the more with which inreligious experience we feel ourselves connected is on itshither side the subconscious continuation of ourconscious life.’ (V, 512) The point not to be missed,however, is that the difference between hither and yonproves to be indeterminate.” Gerald L. Bruns, “LooseTalk about Religion from William James,” in TragicThoughts at the End of Philosophy (Evanston, Ill.:Northwestern University Press, 1999), 37. Bruns thinksthat “loose talk” is the best kind here.

14. Here is Freud in his most confident and belligerentmode: “This does not mean that I lack conviction in thecorrectness of my conclusions. That conviction Iacquired a quarter of a century ago, when I wrote mybook on Totem and Taboo (in 1912), and it has only grownstronger since. From then on I have never doubted thatreligious phenomena are to be understood only on themodel of neurotic symptoms of the individual, which areso familiar to us, as a return of long forgotten importanthappenings in the primeval history of the human family,that they owe their obsessive character to that very originand therefore derive their effect on mankind from thehistorical truth they contain.” Moses and Monotheism, 71.

15. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience(New York: Penguin, 1902), 242.

16. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain, 179.

17. Ibid., 186. In another set of experiments, Buddhistmeditators were asked to signal with blinking eyes whenthey were in a state of lucid dreaming. (The eye muscles

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were chosen because “all other muscle movements areblocked” in this state.) Each time the signal was given,electroencephalographic sensors showed REM activity,the brain activity occurring when dreaming is active. See“Lucid Dreaming,” in Sleeping, Dreaming and Dying: AnExploration of Consciousness with the Dalai Lama, ed.Francisco J. Varela (Boston: Wisdom, 1997). Thesepieces of evidence are subject to multiple interpretations,but they are suggestive. A larger interest explored inSleeping, Dreaming and Dying is what happens whenneuroscientists and Buddhist practitioners are broughttogether so that each group can pose questions to theother.

18. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 62. Damasiogoes on in this section to present the case of a womanwhose amygdala on both sides of the brain was calcified.She understood intellectually about danger, but she wasactually extremely trusting in her conversations and worklife. It would be unwise to draw from a stray statementhere or there that Damasio is a defender of a modernversion of phrenology. He is not, and argues specificallyagainst it. The different brain nodules, operating atdifferent speeds and capacities, participate in complexnetworks. And any particular experience draws on relaysand feedback loops in this network.

19. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 422–23.

20. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 61.

21. Ibid., 109.

22. Ibid., 144.

23. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie:Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect, trans. Douglas Brick(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 54.

24. Thoughtful discussions of irrational cuts are foundin Deleuze, Cinema 2; and David Rodowick, GillesDeleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, N.C.: Duke UniversityPress, 1997). Michael J. Shapiro, in “Toward a Politics ofNow-Time,” Theory & Event 2, no. 2 (1998) (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/toc/archive.html#2.2), explores the political geography of film techniqueand narrative in a very helpful way. See, too, a study thatweaves the politics of ordinary life and the narrativetechniques of several films into a fascinating pastiche inThomas Dumm, The Politics of the Ordinary (New York:New York University Press, 1999).

25. It is possible to read The Apostle simply as the climbto authority by a white male figure who draws sustenancefrom African American life while draining authority fromit. That is one thing going on. And the suggestion that itis the main thing has been made to me when I havepresented the material in this chapter as a paper. Thething to avoid, in my view, is a critical presentation ofthis fact that treats it to be so powerful that it over-whelms everything else. The film’s creative presentations

of how techniques and micropolitics work in down-and-out settings are also important. That’s one of the reasonsI introduce The Return of the Apostle. New work is neededon Sonny, but there are things about him that make itcredible to imagine such work to be possible. Thereductive reading misses much in the first film too.Sonny is a down-and-out guy, even as he becomes anauthoritative male figure. And the racial crossing hasconsiderable vitality and potentiality. What I resist most,then, is the type of reading that reduces Sonny to theauthoritative male role in the putative name of criticizingsuch a monopoly, but then itself secretes presumptionsabout the ubiquity of the master role in a way that makesit impossible to devise strategies to break through it.

26. Vermes draws upon the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England to draw out the differencesbetween Jesus as Jew and the Pauline Jesus. The linesquoted are the first three lines of that prayer. Vermessays, “Today, as in past centuries, the believingChristian’s main New Testament source of faith lies, not so much in Mark, Matthew, and Luke and the stillsufficiently earthly Jesus, as in the centuries of specu-lation by the church on the theological Gospel of Johnwith its eternal word become flesh, and perhaps evenmore in the letters of Paul with their drama of death,atonement and resurrection.” Geza Vermes, The Religionof Jesus the Jew (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 210.

27. “PENTECOST. From the Greek pentekonta (‘fifty’).For the Jews an observance coming fifty days after thePassover and commemorating Moses’ reception of theLaw on Mt. Sinai. For Christians the Day of thePentecost, coming on the seventh Sunday after Easter,commemorates the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.”“PENTECOSTAL SECTS. A group of fundamentalistsects, centered in the United States, whose distinguishingmark is that act of ‘speaking in tongues’ associated withthe Day of the Pentecost.” Dictionary of Philosophy andReligion (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press,1980).

28. The longer formulation is this: “I can scarcelybelieve . . . that men can be induced to examine this viewwithout prejudice, so strongly are they convinced that atthe mere bidding of the mind the body can now be set inmotion, now be brought to rest, and can perform anynumber of actions which depend solely on the will of themind and the exercise of thought. However, nobody hasas yet determined the limits of the body’s capabilities. . . .For nobody as yet knows the structure of the body soaccurately as to explain all its functions.” Spinoza Ethics,pt. III, P2, Scholium, p. 105.

29. At around this point, the question is posed, “But ifyou encounter, as you will, fundamentalists who insistthe divine laws they obey are true and obligatory foreveryone, what do you do?” The first point is not to letthat question stop creative exploration of how to develop

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micropolitics appropriate to pluralism. Those whoattribute fundamentalism to others might also take a lookat the possible element of fundamentalism in their ownposition. In my experience the dogmatic element in someversions of secularism is apparent to many religiousmonists, and that dogmatism helps to intensify thecharacter of their responses. Second, if and as youemphasize the element of contestability in your ownfundamental faith, while exposing it in others as well, youmay open a door to reciprocal engagement that wouldotherwise be closed. But if and as such invitations areconsistently refused, and if you have pursued efforts towork on your own relational perspectives, it thenbecomes wise to forge coalitions through which to resistthe forceful imposition of a single faith upon all of publiclife. The challenge is to do so in a way that does not drawyou too close to the dogmatism you seek to oppose.There are no guarantees here.

6. Democracy and Time

1. Sheldon Wolin, “What Time Is It?” Theory & Event1, no. 1 (1997) (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/toc/archive.html #1.1), 1.

2. Ibid., 2.

3. Ibid., 3.

4. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 157–58.

5. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1, Thinking(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 205.

6. Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” in Democracyand Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed.Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UniversityPress, 1996), 43.

7. Michael Best and I explore changes in the generalinfrastructure of consumption that could move a statefrom the difficult task of generalizing exclusive goods toproviding tax, subsidy, and infrastructural support forinclusive goods in The Politicized Economy, 2d ed. (Boston:Heath, 1982). That study of political economy wouldneed to be updated to mesh with the idea of democraticpluralism developed here. But the account of the rolethat the replacement of exclusive goods by inclusivegoods would play in a democratic political economy isstill relevant.

8. William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity(Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 175.

9. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 93–94.

10. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 303. The quotations tofollow all come from no. 356, pp. 302–4.

11. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 35.

12. Ibid., 38–39.

13. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, II, no. 76, p. 130.

14. Ibid., II, no. 76, p. 131.

15. Exemplary in this respect is William Bennett. SeeWilliam E. Connolly, “Freelancing the Nation,” in WhyI Am Not a Secularist, 97–113.

16. Paul Patton admirably explores the relation of theactor to the artist, and, indeed, of affect to both, in“Nietzsche and the Problem of the Actor,” in WhyNietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture, Politics, ed.Alan D. Schrift (Berkeley: University of California Press,2000), 170–83. Brian Massumi and Paul Patton discussallied issues in “Reagan and the Problem of the Actor”and “Response to Brian Massumi, ‘The Bleed: WhereBody Meets Image,’ ” in Rethinking Borders, ed. John C.Welchman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1996), 41–50.

17. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, IV, no. 319, p. 253.

18. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 203.

19. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 43–44. Nietzscheexplicitly supports a politics in which enmity betweenbelievers and nonbelievers becomes “much moreprudent, much more thoughtful, much more forbearing.”

20. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, IV, no. 354, pp. 298–99.

21. These formulations are found, respectively, inFriedrich Nietzsche, The AntiChrist, trans. R. J.Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 151; Twilight ofthe Idols, 82; and The Gay Science, 274.

22. I explore such techniques with respect to the issueof draining resentment from one’s orientation tocriminal conviction and punishment in The Ethos ofPluralization, chap. 2, and with respect to the question ofdoctor-assisted suicide in “The Will, CapitalPunishment, and Cultural War,” Why I Am Not aSecularist, 115–36.

23. Research carried out by Robert Stickgold ofHarvard and Carlyle Smith of Trent University, asreported in Sandra Blakeslee, “For Better Learning,Researchers Endorse ‘Sleep on It’ Adage,” New YorkTimes, March 7, 2000, sec. 3, p. 8.


25. See B. A. Wallace, “The Buddhist Tradition ofSamatha,” in The View from Within: First PersonApproaches to the Study of Consciousness, ed. Francisco J.Varela and Jonathan Shear (Lawrence, Kans.: ImprintAcademic, 1999), 186.

26. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 150–51.


28. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on thePrejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale

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(Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1982), no. 103,p. 60.

29. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Bookfor Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1986), 383.

7. Eccentric Flows and Cosmopolitan Culture

1. The first three quotations come from Paul Virilio,Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York:Semiotext(e), 1986), 100, 78, 140–41. The next two comefrom The Virilio Reader, ed. James Der Derian (Oxford:Blackwell, 1998), 140, 189. And the last comes fromSpeed and Politics, 142. I am indebted to the excellentintroduction to Virilio offered by James Der Derian andto his interview with Virilio.

2. “But in the moral religion (and of the public religionswhich have ever existed, The Christian alone is moral) itis a basic principle that each must do as much as lies inhis power to become a better man, and that only when hehas not buried his inborn talent (Luke XIX, 12–16), buthas made use of his original predisposition to good inorder to become a better man, can he hope that what isnot within his power will be supplied through coopera-tion from above.” Immanuel Kant, Religion within theLimits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore Greene and HoytHudson (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 48.

3. Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, 48–49; emphasisadded.

4. Indeed, if Kant rejected practical reason, and the“idealism” it sanctions, that would place his conceptionof theoretical reason under pressure, with corollaryeffects on the “realist” side of this thinking. For practicalreason provides the “purest” expression of reason, and ittherefore provides the best index of the regulative idea ofreason governing theoretical reason, practical reason, andaesthetic judgment alike. For a thoughtful account of thecentral role that the regulative idea of reason plays in theKantian system, see Susan Nieman, The Unity of Reason:Rereading Kant (New York: Oxford University Press,1994).

5. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with aCosmopolitan Intent,” in Immanuel Kant: Perpetual Peaceand Other Essays, ed. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis:Hackett, 1983), 30. The larger quotation brings out theways in which Kant’s practical presumption of thepossibility of cosmopolitanism constrains the empiricaljudgment he would otherwise make about the course ofthe world: “If we stray from that fundamental principle[that ‘all of a creature’s natural capacities are destined todevelop completely and in conformity with their end’] weno longer have a lawful but an aimlessly playing natureand hopeless chance takes the place of reason’s guidingthread.”

6. Immanuel Kant, “On the Proverb: That May BeTrue in Theory But Is of No Practical Use,” in PerpetualPeace, 86.

7. Ibid., 87.

8. Ibid.

9. I explore the tangled relations between the Kantiantwo-world metaphysic of morality and attempts by Rawlsand Habermas to replicate significant aspects of it with-out adopting that metaphysic in Why I Am Not a Secularist.

10. The relation between the typical image of thenation and Huntington’s image of Western civilization isbrought out through the consideration of both inrelation to David Campbell’s National Deconstruction:Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Campbell showshow contending demands to create a nation out of theplurality of Yugoslavia engendered ethnic cleansing,population deportations, and massacres. Huntington, onthe other hand, contends that the attempt to foster suchplurality is the problem, because you can’t mix“civilizations” in the same state. The implications thishas for aboriginal peoples and ethnic minorities in a largevariety of territorial states is pernicious. See in particularchapters 6 and 7 of the Campbell study.

11. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations andthe Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon &Schuster, 1996), 156. A comparison between Kant andHuntington that speaks to other issues can be found inWilliam E. Connolly, “The New Cult of CivilizationalSuperiority,” Theory & Event 2, no. 4 (1998) (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/toc/archive.html#2.4). The essays by Michael J. Shapiro (“SamuelHuntington’s Moral Geography”) and Sandra Buckley(“Remaking the World Order”) in the symposium inwhich this piece occurs are also very relevant to therelation between speed and the politics of civilization.

12. For an excellent account of ecological“terrapolitanism,” see Daniel Deudney, “Global VillageSovereignty: Intergenerational Sovereign Publics,Federal-Republican Earth Constitutions, and PlanetaryIdentities,” in The Greening of Sovereignty in WorldPolitics, ed. Karen Liftin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).

13. Huntington loves to reduce cosmopolitanconnections above the intracivilizational level tosnobbish gatherings of effete intellectuals and journalists.But, to cite just one example, the conference organized inAustralia in 1996 by Paul Patton and Duncan Ivison onaboriginal rights in the United States, Australia, NewZealand, and Canada drew aboriginal leaders from allfour countries, as well as an assortment of scholars fromeach. And it quickly became clear to the rest of us thatthe aboriginal leaders are in close cross-country contactwith each other. For two books that cross and

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compromise lines Huntington draws so thickly, seeSaskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age ofGlobalization (New York: Columbia University Press,1996); and Michael Shapiro, Violent Cartographies:Mapping Cultures of War (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1997). An unpublished paper by StacieGoddard of Columbia University, “Of Boundaries andSocieties: Population and International RelationsTheory,” also speaks to these issues very effectively.

14. Martha C. Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debatingthe Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 7, 8, 9,13, 15.

15. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Human Functioning andSocial Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism,”Political Theory 20 (May 1992): 222.

16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans.Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955),151–52. In the paragraph from which this formulation istaken, Nietzsche expresses a hardness toward those whorespect only the “creature” in humanity (as opposed tothe “creator”) that I do not endorse in the way hearticulates it. My relation to Nietzsche is something likeNussbaum’s relation to Aristotle. She draws extensivelyfrom the latter while resisting his orientation to slavesand women. I trust that it is not unreasonable to askthick universalists to give the same respect towardselective indebtedness to Nietzsche that she solicits inthe case of Aristotle. The point of the quote is to showthat Nussbaum’s “binary” distinction between theexercise of compassion and its lack is overdrawn.

17. I will shortly consider a quotation that reflects thispresumption. There are others. And there are also somethat pull Nussbaum away from such a focus. Here is onethat both opens up the possibility of learning from othercultures and encloses that learning in a conception ofculture all too concentric in character for me. “For wewant to allow the possibility that we will learn from ourencounters with other human societies to recognizethings about ourselves that we had not seen before, oreven to change in certain ways, according moreimportance to something we had considered peripheral.”Nussbaum, “Human Functioning,” 216. Yes, but if youstart with a reading that plays up the interdependenceand tension between the concentric and the eccentric inthe life of a state (more than do “we,” “our encounters,”“ourselves,” and “other human societies”), you are in abetter position to appreciate how minorities in one statemight forge significant connections with minorities ormajorities in other states, commanding the attention ofauthorities in both.

18. This may help to explain the caustic and crudesummary of Judith Butler’s perspective advanced by thecompassionate Nussbaum in a 1999 article in which sheends up insisting that Butler’s philosophy “consorts with

evil.” Martha C. Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody:The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler,” New Republic,February 22, 1999, 37–45. From reading Nussbaum’spiece you would not know that Butler had previouslyresponded critically and politely to Nussbaum’s univer-salism with a double-entry model that has some affinitiesto the one I pursue. The main difference is that Butlerdoes not there endorse a regulative idea against which totest thick universals under new and unexpected condi-tions. See Judith Butler, “Universality in Culture,” inNussbaum, For Love of Country, 45–52. For a conversationbetween Judith Butler and me that explores the role oftechnique and the complexity of the universal, see“Politics, Power and Ethics: A Discussion between JudithButler and William Connolly,” Theory & Event 4, no. 2(2000) (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/v004/4.2butler.html).

19. Nussbaum, “Human Functioning,” 241.

20. For an essay that explores the strengths andweaknesses of my conception of “critical responsiveness”in relation to two other notions, see Stephen K. White,“Three Conceptions of the Political: The Real World of Late-Modern Democracy,” in Democracy and Vision:Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political, ed. Aryeh Botwinick and William E. Connolly (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). A relativist,Nussbaum says, is someone who thinks that “the onlyavailable standard to value is some local group orindividual.” “Human Functioning,” 242. I agree. That iswhy I resist the idea that Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault,Butler, and I are relativists. But what does it mean to saya perspective might be “contestable”? Is that anotherword for the same thing? Far from it. To say a basicperspective is contestable is to say that it advancespresumptions and claims that can be supported but havenot yet received, and are not likely to receive in theforeseeable future, such definitive support that they ruleout of court every other possible perspective. To be arelativist is to discourage dialogue and debate acrosscultures, theories, perspectives. To adopt the theme ofdeep contestability is to encourage it, for the alternativeperspective might make surprising claims upon you, orbring out elements in your perspective that you now seeneed reformulation or revision, and so on. To affirm thecontestability of the interpretation you honor the most,and to do so without existential resentment, is to seek tofind ways to promote agonistic respect across thesedifferences, while engaging the challenges the otherpositions pose to your existential faith. The latterpromotes intra- and cross-cultural exchanges; the formerdiscourages it. Too radical a commitment to thickuniversals exerts the same sort of pressure that relativismdoes, although Nussbaum, to her credit, seeks to softenthese tendencies. She could do so even more if she wereto fold more revisions into the concentric model ofculture.

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21. An excellent account of the struggle of Las Casasappears in Tzevetan Todorov, The Conquest of America:The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1985). I explore the implications ofthe Las Casas conversion for contemporary globalpolitics in “Global Political Discourse,” inIdentity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of PoliticalParadox (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).

22. I say possibilities, not probabilities. A key role oftheory is to probe positive possibilities that mightotherwise be overlooked and that, indeed, may beunrecognized because they have been generated by newcircumstances of being. The next thing to do is to inspirethe pursuit of those possibilities that are most desirable.Paying too much attention to “probabilities” undercutsthese two efforts. For, most of the time, the recognizedregister of probabilities consists of things that are alreadypart of established practice. Those who pursuedChristianity, secularism, feminism, gay rights, and soforth at the key moments of their emergence from belowthe register of established practice were not probabilistsof the sort annointed by most social scientists. They wereacting to bring something new into the world even morethan they were watching to see what was already there.And each time such a project succeeds, in a large or small

way, it provides another piece of evidence, for those whowill look, against the ontology of much of contemporarysocial science. Possibilities are for visionaries andactivists; probabilities are for spectators and consultants.

23. For an account that takes several valuable steps inthe needed direction, see James Tully, StrangeMultiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

24. On this issue, see the introduction by BruceRobbins in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds.,Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); and Peter Euben, “The Polis, Globalization, and theCitizenship of Place,” in Democracy and Vision: SheldonWolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political, ed. AryehBotwinick and William E. Connolly (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 2001).

25. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), II, no.87, p. 342.

26. Ibid.

27. I discuss this issue in “Spinoza and Us,” PoliticalTheory (August 2001): 583–95.

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Bennett, Jane: and arts of the self, 210; and enchantment,204

Bergson, Henri: and cinema, 41; and Einstein, 60; andJames, 205; on memory and perception, 16, 26–30, 41,167; and Nietzsche, 77; on the virtual, 96; body: thebody/brain/culture network, 1–21, 36, 63, 75, 90,92–93, 112

Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel: on Freud, 131–32brain, the. See neuroscienceBresson, Robert: on hostility to art, 17Bruns, Gerald: on James, 211Buckley, Sandra: on speed and politics, 214Buddhism, 93, 96, 124, 170Butler, Judith: and universalism, 215

Campbell, David: on deconstructing the nation, 214capitalism, 143, 148, 149–53, 163causality: efficient, 57, 203, 208; immanent, 57, 203–4,

208; and neuroscience, 82; Nietzsche on, 57–58, 67;Prigogine and Stengers on, 57–58

Changeux, Jean-Pierre: on parallelism, 204Christianity: and anti-Semitism, 119–24; developments

in, 172; and Kant, 84, 107, 180–85, 214; and NewWorld, 194–95; and public ethics, 115; and the Right,161; and spiritual exercises, 133–37

cinema: effects of, xii, 2, 13; and effects on infraconsciousperception, 13–16, 25, 67–68, 95; and fantasy, 204;and memory, 15, 93–99; and techniques of self, 96,168–69; and thinking, 93–99

affect: and ethics, 107, 133; and language, 64–76; andthinking, 9, 64–78, 91, 95, 97, 170; ubiquity of, 76–78;and virtual memory, 28, 33–37

agonistic respect, 108, 111, 147, 160, 164, 171, 200amygdala: and body/brain processes, 8, 27, 90, 91, 104,

127, 206, 212anxiety, 109, 146, 148, 166, 169Apostle, The: and deep pluralism, 136–37; and irrational

cuts, 134; reductive readings of, 212; and technique,133–37

Arendt, Hannah: and Deleuze, 210; on gap between pastand future, 146–47, 210

arts of the self: Augustine on, 208; Bennett on, 210;Deleuze on, 107, 108; Foucault on, 107, 108, 210;Hampshire on, 107; Kant on, 85, 88; andmicropolitics, 108, 113; Nietzsche on, 77, 107,163–66, 169–74

Asad, Talal: on symbolism and technique, 107Assmann, Jan: on Moses and monotheism, 211atheism. See nontheistic gratitude for beingAugustine: and language, 73, 74, 208; on paradox of time,

44

becoming: in nature, 53–58, 66; Nietzsche on, 53–55;politics of, 72, 129, 130, 145, 159, 171, 179, 186–87,192, 194

Being John Malkovitch: and complexity of perception,29–30

Benjamin, Walter: on cinematic technique, 95

Index

cinematic techniques: of close-up, 68; Deleuze on, 94–98;of depth-of-field shot, 38–39, 98–99; of flashback, 29–30, 96; of irrational cuts, 135, 168, 169; Zizek on, 204

Citizen Kane: and the layered image of perception, 37–41,98–99

Clark, Andy: on language, 208Concentricus, 194Connolly, William: and Nietzsche, 153–74; on speed,

179; on technique, 100–103; wagers of, 2, 162constructivism, 17–18contestability: and relativism, 215cosmopolitanism: concentric models of, 185–94; and ec-

centric connections, 186–87, 191–94; Kant on, 180–86; new matrix of, 194–201; Nussbaum on, 187–94;and speed, 177–201

crime, 213critical responsiveness: ethos of, 55, 106–8, 116, 160, 171,

193, 215cultural theory: reductionism of, xiii, 3, 5, 6, 41–49, 59,

62–64, 146, 151, 158culture: concentric, 185–94; eccentric, 185–94; and

family, 19–20; Freudian interpretation of, 7; Hegel on,18–20; layered character of, 2, 7, 17–21, 41–49, 61, 64,138; and noise, 45; objective and subjective dimensionsof, 18–20

cynicism, 111; and television: 24, 25

Damasio, Antonio: on body/brain relations, 8, 33–37, 76,127, 170, 208, 212

DeLanda, Manuel: on nonlinear time, 205Deleuze, Gilles: and Arendt, 210; and belief in the body,

210; on bird culture, 207; on cinema, 93, 94–96, 98–99, 168; on Citizen Kane, 98–99, 205; and Hampshire,94, 209; and Kant, 93–95; on memory, 99; on micro-politics, 107, 108; on nature, 94; on thinking, 93–99;on time, 96–98, 210

democracy: and deep pluralism, 136–37; deliberative, 17, 36; experimentalism of, 160, 172–73; fugitive,149–53; fundamentalism of, 160; and inclusive goods,213; and Nietzsche, 153–74; and purity, 149, 153; andtime, 141–75, 177–201; Wolin on, 141–44, 149

denial: strategy of, 9, 12Dennett, Daniel, 207Derrida, Jacques: on deconstruction, 191Descartes, René: dualism of, 7Deudney, Daniel: on terrapolitanism, 214difference: politics of, 42–44dissipative structures, 55–58distance, compression of. See speeddiversity, multidimensional, 2–3dreams, 25, 40, 70–71, 169, 211–12drugs: and thinking, 90Dumm, Thomas: on politics of the ordinary, 212dyslexia: and body/brain system, 63, 207

Earth: attachment to the, 197–98ecology: and reductionism, 62

Edelman, Gerald: on the brain, 8, 203Einstein: and Bergson, 60; on the illusion of time, 60, 76Epicurus, 73, 103, 124ethical sensibility, 107, 128. See ethicsethics: and contestability of sources, 106, 136; and

cultivation, 93, 104, 106, 107, 132–33, 197; double-entry orientation to, 195–96; and immanent natural-ism, 86–87, 104–8; and intellectualism, 111; andmicropolitcs, 108–12, 133; and morality, 87, 124; andperception, 29; and regulation of instincts, 130–31;and technique, 106–7; and therapy, 131–33; thinking,1, 87; and time, 145; tragic element in, 106

ethos of engagement, 105, 128, 130, 162, 164, 208evolution, 60expressivism, 71–75; and Augustine, 208; and Taylor

206–7Eyes Wide Shut: and affect and perception, 25

faith: and contestability, 115–16, 124, 130; quasi-pagan, 124family: and culture, 19–20fashion, 142Five Easy Pieces: and the role of affect, 68–70; and the

virtual, 70–71flashback, the, 29–30, 96forgetfulness: and perception, 27Foucault, Michel: and arts of the self, 107, 108, 210; and

Kant, 210freedom, 1, 113, 129Freud, Sigmund: on anti-Semitism, 120; on ethics, 130–31;

on historical imagination, 116–17; and instinctrenunciation, 130–32; interpretive immodesty of, 211;and James, 211; and memory traces, 117, 120–24, 130;and monotheism, 116–120; on Moses story, 116–20,127, 129, 130–31; on Pauline Christianity, 119–20; onprimordial guilt, 122; and techniques of self, 128–32;transference, 131–32

fundamentalism: dangers of, 116, 143, 147, 159–60, 180,212–13

generosity, receptive, 86–87, 93, 104, 106, 113, 129, 132,143, 148, 162, 164, 169

Giannetti, Louis: on Citizen Kane, 39, 205globalization: and the accentuation of tempo, 149–53,

177–201Gould, Stephen J.: on nonlinear evolution, 60grace: cultivating, 163–66Habermas, Jürgen: and deliberative ethics, 85half-second delay: and perception, 83, 208–9Hampshire, Stuart: and Deleuze, 94, 203; on Kant, 89; on

Spinoza, 89–90, 203; and technique, 91–92; andthinking, 88–89, 104

hand gestures, xiii–xivHegel, G. W. F.: on culture, 18–20, 204–5; metaphysics

of, 90Heidegger, Martin: and expressivism, 72, 74, 203Held/Heims experiment, 32–33Hitchcock, Alfred, 14–17

I n d e x

homosexuality, 195homunculus, 10–11Holocaust: affect of the term, 37Honig, Bonnie: on Moses, 211Huntington, Samuel: civilizopolism of, 185–87, 193hypnosis, 125

ideas: regulative, 197; as thought-imbued intensities, 197immanence: and transcendence, 81–93immanent naturalism: and cultivation, 106; and ethics, 85–

93, 104–8, 113; and genealogy, 106; and micropolitics,110–12; and Spinoza, 105; and techniques, 106. Seealso ethics

immigration: politics of, 149–53inclusive goods, 213indigeneous people, 195infraperception, 27infrasensible, 86, 104intellectualism: shallowness of, 1, 10, 21, 64–67, 76, 105,

111, 133, 138, 170, 171, 205

James, Williams: and Bergson, 205; on deep pluralism,126–130; and the layering of thinking, 66; on religiousexperience, 124–30, 137

Jarmusch, Jim, 135, 168Judaism: Freud on, 116–20; in Return of the Apostle, 135–37

Kafka, 99Kandinsky: on color, 31Kant, Immanuel: and arts of the self, 85, 88, 107, 132;

and Christianity, 84, 107, 180–85, 214; and cosmo-politanism, 180–85; and Deleuze, 93–95; andFoucault, 210; and morality, 24, 84, 85, 89, 94, 104,180–85, 206; on naturalism, 84–85; on nature, 55, 56;and neuroscience, 209; on providence, 183–84; onregulative ideals, 195–96; on Spinoza, 89, 198–200;and sublime, 66; and transcendental arguments, 52,56, 59, 66, 88; and transcendental field, 83–85, 91; andtwo-world metaphysic, 196, 209; and will, 106

Kaplan, Ann: and Film Noir, 205–6Knoblauch, Chuck, 100Kubrik, Stanley, 25

language: accordion model of, 62; and affect, 64–76; ascreative, 72–73; as expressive, 71–75; as representative,73–74; and thinking, 64–76

language: and composition, 72–73; and creation, 72–73;and expression, 73; and forgetting, 70–72; intercodeddimensions of, 64–76

Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 194–95Last Year at Marienbad, 99laughter, 9, 169LeDoux, Joseph: on body/brain networks, 76, 91, 206,

211Lone Star: and forgiveness, 153Lucretius: on anima and mind, 81–82, 208; on mortality,

88; naturalism of, 81–82; on the swerve, 81–82, 93

Massumi, Brian: on autonomy of affect, 205; and problemof the actor, 213

memory: and action, 37–41, 120–24; and affect, 28;Damasio on, 33–37; Deleuze on, 99; Freud on,120–24; three levels of, 38; traces, 18, 41, 47, 117–24;virtual (or motor), 24, 26–29, 31, 33–37, 68–70, 97, 98

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: on nature and culture, 64Michaels, Walter Benn: on culture and pluralism, 41–49micropolitics: and arms control, 110; and arts of the self,

108, 113; and ethics, 108–12, 133; and juridicalization,108–10; and new pluralism, 20–21, 130; misticket, to,210

Modleski, Tania: on Vertigo, 13Moses, 116–20, 127, 129, 130–31, 211Mulvey, Laura: on Vertigo, 13mystical states: and deep pluralism, 124–30

naturalism: eliminative, 86; immanent, 85–93;mechanical, 86

nature: classical conceptions of, 2, 3, 5, 51, 53, 87; culturaltheory’s conceptions of, 2; and culture, 4, 51–52, 63,158; Nietzsche on, 52–58, 145–46; theo-teleologicalconception of, 2, 17–18, 53, 87; and unpredictability,52–60

Neiman, Susan: on regulative reason, 214neuropolitics, xiiineuroscience: and cinema, 1–3, 95; developments in, 2, 5,

82; and dreaming, 169; and enactive model of brain,33; and perception, 32–37; and technique, 4–12,35–36, 100–104, 167–69; and thinking, 1–13, 82, 83,90–93, 104

Nietzsche, Friedrich: on arts of the self, 163–66, 169–74;on asceticism, 206–7; on becoming, 53–55; andBergson, 77; and body, 210; on compassion, 190; anddemocracy yet to come, 153–74; on ethics, 155, 172;on grace, 163–66; on Jesus, 171; and logic, 52–53, 67,77, 155, 206; on moderation, 160–61; on morality,155; on nature and science, 52–58, 145–46, 155,206–7; on nobility, 163–66, 171; on nontheisticgratitude, 155, 170; on pathos of distance, 155, 171;on relativism, 191; on ritual, 166; and Spinoza, 77; ontechnique, 76–78, 155, 158, 163–66; on thinking,64–67, 75–76

on time, 144–45, 155; and truth, 44–45nihilism, 93, 111, 160nobility: cultivating, 163–66, 171nontheistic gratitude, 73–73, 102, 104, 197Nørretranders, Tor: on neuroscience, 82, 208–9Nuñez, Rafael: on neuroscience, 82, 208Nussbaum, Martha: and Butler, 210; on cosmopolitanism,

187–94, 215

pain, phantom, 6, 10–13parallelism: as dual perspective, 89; as metaphysical

doctrine, 7–8; Ricoeur on, 204; Spinoza’s doctrine of,7–8, 89, 203, 209

passing: and race, 46–49

2 1 8 , 9

past: sheets of, 40, 96–97. See also memory; timepathos of distance, 111–12. See also agonistic respectPatton, Paul: on the actor and the artist, 213Pearson, Keith Ansell: on evolution, 60–61Pecker: and passing, 46Pentecost, 137, 212perception: Bergson on, 16, 26–30; and cinema, 25; color

of, 22–49; and ethics, 29; neurophysiology of, 26–29,32–37; and somatic markers, 34–37; as substractive,16, 27, 83; and television, 23–25

performative contradiction: Kant on, 199; Michaels on,42–44

philosophy: minor tradition of, 2Pleasantville: and layered character of culture, 43, 49pluralism: deep, 126–30, 136–37, 170–73; enclave, 45;

new, 1–3, 45, 108, 133, 138, 143, 162, 206;Pentecostal, 137–38

poetry, 72police: and memory and anxiety, 30–32Prigogine, Ilya: on nonlinear science, 52, 55–58, 82, 135,

146, 207

race, 41–49, 123, 148–53, 213Ramachandran, V. S.: on the brain, 6, 9–13, 126–27Rawls, John: model of justice of, 85recognition, politics of, 159religious experience: varieties of, 115–16, 124–30Resnais, Alain, 99Return of the Apostle: and Pentecostal pluralism, 135–37;

and techniques of self, 132–34Ricoeur, Paul: on parallelism, 204

Sassen, Saskia, 215Sayles, John, 153scapegoats: and Christianity, 119–20; in late modernity,

147–48, 162–63science. See naturesecularism: and religious diversity, 115, 129, 130, 137,

170Shapiro, Michael: on film, 212; on violent cartographies,

215Shaviro, Steven: on cinema and affect, 25, 68sociobiology: reductionism of, 61–62, 64Sokal, Alan: and Jean Bricmont on science, 59somatic markers, 34–37, 40, 47speed: ambiguity of, 177–80; and democracy, 141–75; in

late modernity, 61, 104, 113, 116, 141–75, 177–80;and new pluralism, 2; Virilio on, 177–80

Spinoza, Benedict de: on the body, 138, 212; and exis-tential joy, 105; Kant on, 198–200; and Nietzsche, 77;parallelism of, 7–8, 89, 203, 209; on perception, 167

Stengers, Isabelle: on science, 4, 52, 55–58, 207Stranger than Paradise: and irrational cuts, 135, 168, 169Straussians, 162suicide, 189–90, 213

Taylor, Charles: and attunement, 85, 209; andexpressivism, 207–8

technique: and cinema, 13–14; in ethics, xii, 1, 20–21, 41,107, 108, 132–33, 137; and memory, 120–24;Nietzsche on, 76–78; in politics, xiii, 1, 20–21, 41, 108;and thinking, xiii, 1, 8, 12–14, 16, 35–56, 45, 65, 82,88, 89–90, 95, 100–104, 107, 108, 124, 130, 133–38.See also arts of self; micropolitics

television: perception, 23–25; Weber on, 23–24Terms of Political Discourse, The, 210theory: modesty in, 16, 52, 78, 111–12, 212–13, 145–46,

148, 200–201; role of, 2, 129, 137, 216thinking: and affect, 9, 64–78, 91, 95, 97, 170; and

body, 8; and cinematic techniques, 13–14, 16–17,93–99; as compositional, 1, 11, 97, 99, 103–4, 168–69; as creative, 1, 16, 28, 53, 62, 66, 72–73, 75, 94–95, 97, 98, 99, 103–4, 113; and culture, 18; defined, 1; and déjà vu, 97–98; and ethics, 1; as expressive,71–75, 99, 103–4; and freedom, 1; and “half-seconddelay,” 83, 85, 90, 208–9; Hampshire on, 104; andimmanence, 85–93; and language, 64–76; layeredcharacter of, xiii, 2, 8, 10, 13, 59, 62–78, 87–88, 91, 95, 108, 112–13; and memory, 93–99; and neuro-science, 1–13, 82, 83, 90–93, 104; Nietzsche on,64–67, 75–76, 76–78; and politics, 1; and proto-thoughts, 65, 71–72, 78, 210; and technique, xiii, 1, 8,12–14, 16, 35–56, 45, 65, 82, 88, 89–90, 95, 100–104,107, 108, 124, 130, 133–38; and thought, 99; andunthought, 112

time: Arendt on, 146–47; as becoming, 144–46; democ-racy and, 141–75; and eternal return, 144–48; andethics, 145; forks in, 39–40, 60, 96–98, 144, 145, 193,197; linear model of, 144, 145, 166–67; progressivemodel of, 144; rift in, 141–49, 168; sheets of, 31;teleological model of, 144; zones of, 141–44

transcendental, the, 81–85truth: correspondence theory of, 51, 145; Nietzsche on,

44–45, 51

Varela, Francisco: and the embodied mind, 92, 106–7Vermes, Geza: on Jesus the Jew, 212Vertigo: and infraconscious perception, 14–17Virilio, Paul: on speed and politics, 177–80virtual, the, 38, 44, 70–71, 97, 122–23, 168. See also affect;

memoryvisceral register, 108, 130, 137

Waters, John, 46Weber, Samuel: on television, 23–24White, Stephen: on critical responsiveness, 215; on weak

ontology, 204Wilson, Elizabeth: on feminism and biology, 203Wolin, Sheldon: on democracy and time, 141–44, 149

Zizek, Slavoj: and film theory, 204

TH

EO

RY

William E. Connolly teaches political theory at The Johns Hopkins University, where he is professor and chair in the political science department. In 1999

he was awarded the Benjamin Lippincott Award for The Terms of Political Discourse,an award given for “a work of exceptional quality. . . still considered

significant after a time span of fifteen years.” His recent publications include The Ethos of Pluralization,

Why I Am Not a Secularist, and a new expanded edition of Identity\Difference, all published by the University of Minnesota Press.

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